La raza : the Mexican Americans 0060902035

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THE MEXICAN AMERICANS STAN STEINER author of The New Indians

HARPER

M

COLOPHON BOOK5/CN 203/$1.95

La Raza THE

MEXICAN

AMERICANS

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La Raza THE MEXICAN AMERICANS

Stan Steiner

HARPER COLOPHON BOOKS Harper & Row, Publishers NEW

YORK,

EVANSTON,

AND

LONDON

Chapter XXIV was first published in Vogue in somewhat different form as “ ‘The Cultural Schizophrenia’ of Luis Valdez.”

Excerpts from A Cross for Maclovio, © 1968 by Rodolfo Gonzales, and / Am Joaquin, © 1967; by Rodolfo Gonzales, are reprinted by permission of the author.

Copyright © 1969, 1970 by Stan Steiner. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written per¬ mission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 49 East 33rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10016. Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Toronto.

la raza: the Mexican Americans.

First harper colophon edition published 1970 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 77-83622

And the Pope said to the conquistadors: Go forth and create La Santa Raza! The Holy Race! In a cantina, a bar, nowadays a man will say to another, “Say, Eduardo. How's the wife and kids?” And the other man will say, “We had another kid. Now we got six!” So the first man will laugh, “You old goat! Creating La Santa Raza, eh?” —In the cafe of the de Vargas Hotel in Santa Fe, one morning over coffee, a man from the northern mountains ex¬ plaining the meaning of La Santa Raza

I wish God had made people blind. Then a touch of the hand, a word of the mouth, would be all they would need to know their neighbor. People now judge each other by how they look, not by how they are. If God can perform miracles why can’t He make people blind? Why can’t we have perceptions like radar antenna to judge with? Our eyes betray us. —Eduardo Perez, a community leader

in the

barrios of

Los Angeles

Contents

prologue:

PART

Cleofas, the Man

of

the Earth :

1

ONE

i. Conquistador on a Motorcycle :

17

ii. The Black Swords of H. H. Mondragon : 27 iii. The Stones of the Poor : 40 iv. The Lion and the Cricket : 51 v. The Fall of the Bastille of Yellow Earth : 66 vi. The New Breed : vii. The

Death and Resurrection of the Rural Village : 97

PART viii. La

81

Junta :

ix. Exodus :

TWO

113

123

x. The Man with the Guitar :

133

xi. In the Barrios of the City of Angels and Seven Hells : 140

Viii |

CONTENTS

The Urban Villages : 140 The Masks of the Invisible Men : 144 The Quaint Starve : 150 The Communal Colony : 155 Evening in the Barrios : 159

xii. The Conquered Country : 161 xiii. In the Suburbs of the Spanish Myths : 173 xiv. The Secret Politicians : 186 xv. Gracias por Nada : 198 xvi. The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa : 208 The De-education Schools : 208 The Language of La Raza : 216 The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa : 225

xvn. The Chicanos : 230

PART THREE xvm. In the Vineyards of the Lord of the Land : 247 The Man Who Worked for Thirty Years Without Pay : 247 The Dignity of the Farm Worker : 254 Gringoismo! : 259 El Grito of the Landless : 265

xix. On a Lonely Country Road : 272 xx. The War of the Flowers : 276 xxi. The Men Without Numbers : 291 xxii. The Coyote Talks : 300 xxiii. The Cross of Cesar Chavez : 310 xxiv. Viva La Cucaracha! : 324 xxv. The Unfrocked Priests : 339 xxvi. Of Blood and Death : 354

Contents

The Region of the Damned :

354

Blood and Death : 359 The Quiet Revolution : 367 epilogue:

The Poet in the Boxing Ring : 378

Sources : 393 Index : 407

|

ix

Illustrations

The following are grouped after page 114:

Villagers of Sangre de Cristo, Poor People’s March, 1968, Washington, D.C. Reies Lopez Tijerina, prophet of the land-grant movement Tijerina with Hispano farmers and ranchers, /vntonchico Two crosses leading to Antonchico bridge American-Spanish-Chinese restaurant, Grants, New Mexico Abandoned wooden carreta, near Socorro, New Mexico Old farm worker, Lower Rio Grande Valley, Texas Poor farming colony, Lower Rio Grande Valley, Texas Farmer on communal land, Tierra Amarilla / Mrs. Gregorita Aguilar, president of Tierra Amarilla’s Cooperativa Agricola, with baby goats Graffiti on walls of house, Visalia, California

The following are grouped after page 242:

Cesar Chavez leading march of the campesinos Wall near farm workers’ union headquarters, Los Angeles

Xii

|

ILLUSTRATIONS

Forty Acres, fasting place of Cesar Chavez, outside Delano, California Luis Valdez, founder of El Teatro Campesino Danny Valdez and Augustin Lira Cesar Chavez and his wife, Helen, at campesino rally Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, leader of Denver Chicano revolt Militant Delano farm woman Rent strikers from San Joaquin Valley, California Father John Luce celebrating Mass during 1968 sit-in, Los Angeles School Board Student strikes, spring, 1968, East Los Angeles Brown Beret girl at “Fiesta de los Barrios,” Lincoln High School, Los Angeles

La Raza THE

MEXICAN

AMERICANS

v

/

prologue:

Cleofas, the Man of the Earth

“I love to be poor. I would rather be poor than rich. Yes, I think so. I have been poor all my life. I don’t feel it any more. I am immune to being poor.” Cleofas Vigil’s face is lined by the dry earth of the village of San Cristobal and the cold winds of the Sangre de Cristo—the Blood of Christ—Mountains. But his face is not hard. He is not poor that way. There is a warmth in his eyes. “I live with the weeds,” he says. He leans on his shovel. The digging is hard. But this stubborn land has known his family intimately for generations, they are buried here, and it welcomes his shovel. Still, he breathes heavily. It is not easy work to dig an earth cellar. “It is a good feeling when you rub your fingers in the soil that produces food for life,” Cleofas says. He is a tall man, with the set jaw of a farmer. In the village he is a respected citizen: the head of the Cattle Growers Association and the Water Users Association. Where a herd may mean ten head of cattle and a ranch may mean less than forty acres, these are positions of honor, not of wealth. “I own a few acres in this beautiful valley of San Cristobal,” he modestly says. “Our country here, the mountains, I think it is one of the most beautiful mountains and villages in the

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LA RAZA: THE MEXICAN AMERICANS

country of the United States. But it is one of the most poor. Cleofas is the poet of his village. He is a musician and a wood carver and a singer of corridos and alabados, much sought after for weddings and baptisms and burials—a poet in the older tradition, that of the village chronicler and seer. He is a sophisticated man who knows that the truth is as cruel and beautiful as the earth. “I will tell you a story,” he says. “There were two men. One of them had a pocket full of money. He was rich. But the other man, he had nothing but some tortillas in his hand. He was poor. These two men were traveling together. And they went to many towns, and whenever they came to a restaurant, the man with the pocket full of money he bought himself a big dinner. But the poor man, he sat outside and ate his tortillas, because that was all he had to eat. “And they came to a desert. It was a real desert. There was no town on it. No restaurant either! “And the rich man, with his pocket full of money, was more and more hungry, he had nothing to eat. But the poor man, he ate his tortillas. The tortillas were very dry tortillas by now, and very hard. But they were still good to eat. “ ‘Will you sell me one of your tortillas?’ the rich man asked the poor man. “ ‘Eat your money,’ the poor man said. “And the rich man, he died. But the poor man, he got across the desert. “That is a story my grandfather told me. That is fiction, you know. It is what you call an example. But it is the truth. The Anglo, he does not understand that story.” Once more Cleofas digs. He says, “I will tell you what the Anglo, he understands. Money! Money! Money! Money! Money! Money! Money! Money! Money! Money!” And he laughs. Cleofas’ way of sanctifying the poor has little to do with poverty. He is saying something else, something quite ancient. The act of being poor symbolizes the villagers’ acquiescence to nature, the peaceful¬ ness of the earth, and humility before God. As long ago as 1629 the scholarly Fray Alonso de Benavides wrote of the settlers in the vil¬ lages along the valleys of the Rio Grande, “As long as they have a

prologue: Cleofas, the Man of the Earth

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3

good crop of tobacco to smoke, they are very content, and wish no riches. It seems as if they have taken a vow of poverty.” The good priest believed there were valuable ore deposits in New Mexico, but when he suggested this to the villagers “they laughed at him”—an unheard-of thing for Spaniards to do, he wrote sarcastically, “who out of greed for silver and gold would enter Hell itself.” But the villagers did not wish wealth. Nowadays being poor is a way of life. The fields of the village lie fallow. In a time of supermarket farming it hardly pays to plow the tiny plots. Many of the houses in the village are empty. Not abandoned, just empty. The families have gone to the cities in search of work. On the small farms throughout the Southwest there is quietude. The waiting houses, the empty corrals, the decaying fences, the ruins of adobe walls as old as history, and the silent churches are everywhere, not merely in the village of San Cristobal. The gate of the church is broken. The priest comes only on Satur¬ day, if he comes at all. *“Our road was dirt in my grandfather’s time,” Cleofas says. “It has not changed. The dirt is the same dirt, but maybe it is not as good as it was. Maybe it is worse.” Where the old road breaks off and falls, like a river of mud into the valley, it forks and winds through the juniper woods to the ranch of D. H. Lawrence, where the real Lady Chatterley’s lover had lived. He wrote here in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of his search for the pagan sun of the Southwest; but now he is buried in a whitewashed shrine kept by the University of New Mexico for the tourists. His ashes are entombed under a Mexican altar guarded by the dogs of a gatekeeper and a poet-in-residence, a few miles from the Vigil farm. In the dust outside the shrine is the grave of Lawrence’s wife Frieda. “I did not know him,” Cleofas says. “But I helped dig the grave of his wife.” The farmer was a boy then. He does not remember these tourist writers too well; so many lonely intellectuals come from Taos, from the East, to the village, on pilgrimages to the earth. One summer the hippies wandered into the valley and stayed a while. They built tepees in Arroyo Hondo and tried to set up a tribal community. They came to San Cristobal, too. No one bothered them

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LA

RAZA:

THE

MEXICAN

AMERICANS

in their gypsy camp on the mountainside at first, and then they wan¬ dered off again. “I think they are good people,” Cleofas says of the flower children. “But why do they wear their hair like babies? Are they babies? They harm no one but themselves.” Cleofas feels sorrow for the hippies. They have no people, no land, no memories, he says, so they are trying to invent a way of life in their minds. “Where will they go?” he says. “Where are their people?” These people who come like refugees from the Anglo way of affluence, searching for roots in his poor land, fascinate Cleofas. He has compas¬ sion for them, but he is troubled by them. “Why are they so alone?” he asks. “Always they say ‘Dig.’ If they want roots why don’t they dig? That is where roots are,” he says. “That is how to be together with other men. “Old-timers, like my grandfather, they were very much together, they weren’t divided the way we are now. They believed in helping each other. And their trade was different from what it is now; they traded one product for another. Like beans for potatoes, and potatoes for lentils, and lentils for carrots, and cabbages, and so on. “In those days when a man’s harvest was ready he did not say to his neighbor, ‘Come, help me.’ His neighbor watched the field of his neighbor, and he knew when it was time to go and help. He did not have to be asked. Now the field of my neighbor is almost ready, and when it is ready I would like to go to him and help with his harvest. That is the way it should be. A man should help his neighbor without being asked. “In those days we had a mill in the valley. Someone stole the millstones. They use them for doorsteps, you know, in Santa Fe. “Who can bring back the old ways? Sometimes people say to me, ‘You want to bring back the old ways.’ No, I cannot. Not with an ox. Not with a bull. I cannot. No one can. The tractor is a blessing. The water in the kitchen is a blessing. The airplane is a blessing. I do not oppose new things because they are new. But only when they are bad. “In those days that I remember, everything was in harmony, every¬ body was in harmony. What I would bring back is the harmony.” He remembers that the village was no richer then, but that the

prologue: Cleofas, the Man of the Earth

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5

people were more religious and happier. The land was freer and the forest was unfenced. “The old-timers, like my grandfather and father, they lived from their little farms, from their little land, land our ances¬ tors left us. The freedom they had in the forests in those days! Our ancestors made a better living because they had more free land, they had more freedom. “Our lands are small,” Cleofas says, “so we naturally need the forests, our common lands, to graze our herds. We can’t graze ten head of cows on our small land.” In the village of San Cristobal every family has a small plot, some of less than ten acres. The plots are cut in narrow strips, from the bottom land along the river that cuts through the valley, so that every inch of the fertile, flat earth can be farmed. The village lies close to the little river that nourishes the land. In the high deserts, where the rain is scarce, the water is sacred. And the plots of the villagers have traditionally been small. Even in the days of the huge land grants long ago the actual farms were small. As late as 1855 the largest farm in New Mexico was said to be 1,721 acres, belonging to a rico (rich) family in Bernalillo County. Yet the common pastures in the forests and mountains, which be¬ long to everyone in the village, are vast. The'cattle of the farmers have always roamed free here. It is sometimes thought that these common lands originated in the land system of feudal Spain. But it was not wholly European, nor was it wholly feudal, to divide the land this way. Under the ancient kingdoms of the Aztecs there were such common lands—the calpulli. A “dividing of the inhabited lands into suburbs, or calpulli, each with a set amount of land; this land belonging not to the inhabitants as individuals, but rather being granted to a family, or tribe” (El Derecho Agrario, by Gabino Fraga), was the way the Mexi¬ can Indians planned their villages. In the Laws of the Indies the kings of Spain protected these communal lands of the Aztecs. When the Espaholes Mejicanos settled in New Mexico they brought this system of common lands with them. The viceroys of New Spain perpetuated the ancient Indian way of holding (and in common by their communal land grants to whole villages in New Mexico.

6

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LA RAZA: THE MEXICAN AMERICANS

The communal village with its common lands once was the accepted way of life in the mountain villages of the high valleys. Once. But no longer. “The Government of the United States took it away, our lands, turned more than half of our lands into National Forests. For what?” Cleofas says. When CTeofas was a young man, in 1938, the surveyors of the U.S. Soil Conservation Service counted 358,019 acres in the National For¬ ests of Taos County, New Mexico, where the village of San Cristobal lies at the forest’s edge. These very same National Forests had grown, by 1965, to 451,245 acres, an increase of 93,226 acres (29.1 per cent) in the federally fenced land. Where did these “new” National Forests come from? The lands were taken largely from the public domain, the ejidos, or common pastures, where the villagers’ herds had grazed for centuries as freely as the wild deer. Now, the villagers must get permits to graze their herds on what was their own land. If the confused cows wander into the wrong part of the forest by mistake, they are impounded and imprisoned in the corrals of the forest rangers. “Either you pay a fine, or you lose the privilege of putting that cow in the forest the next year,” Cleofas says. “If you have a permit for twelve head of cows and they impound two, the next year you will have a permit for ten cows. A fellow with ten cows, maybe that same guy used to have thirty or forty head. Now they don’t allow that. Every year they cut you more and more. “Ten head of cows! You can’t make a living on that! How can we feed our families?” In San Cristobal there were 350 grazing permits for cattle issued to the ranchers in 1947; there were 140 permits in 1967: a reduction of 60 per cent. The “free permits” for milk cows, bulls, and horses have been eliminated. Cattle who were fortunate enough to be permitted into the forests have to graze most of the summer, until August 1, “on land where there is practically no grass; and rather than allow animals to starve to death, the men are selling them or butchering them. . . .” It is the same in every village. The La Jarita allotment of permits has been cut from 839 to 420; at El Rito, 4,000 lambing permits have been withdrawn from the sheepherders; in Rio Arriba the permits

prologue: Cleofas, the Man of the Earth

|

7

were reduced by 65 per cent in one year (1965); while in Canjilon more than 1,000 year-round permits for cattle have been withdrawn entirely. “Our poverty is made and created by the Government of the United States,” Cleofas says. “The problem of the poor is that the Govern¬ ment of the United States creates this poverty in the villages.” In the state of New Mexico the largest landowner is the United States Government. “The federal government owns 34.9 per cent of the state’s acreage,” says the New Mexico State Planning Office. That is 27,150,000 acres. With the Indian reservations—6.8 per cent of the land—and the land of the state of New Mexico—12 per cent— the federal- and state-controlled lands total 53.7 per cent of New Mexico. Of this vast terrain the Forest Service has been entrusted with control of 9,046,789 acres, almost six times as much land as was owned by the fabulous King Ranch in Texas. The National Forests that surround the village of San Cristobal, and its brother mountain hamlets, comprise one of every three acres in the northern counties. In Taos County these federal lands are 44.3 per cent of the area. No wonder the village farmer, with his few acres, feels overwhelmed by the landlords in the government! Once the forests may have been a refuge to the iconoclast of the frontier, who was known as a pioneer, but no longer. The explorer, the hunter, or the village farmer who has not paid for his permit is a trespasser, according to the law. Forests, that is, National Forests, are no longer free to the public. “The law treats Forest Service land as private land,” says W. D. Hurst, a regional forest official. Hurst is a wilderness bureaucrat who seeks to govern nature by the regulations, not by the seasons of mat¬ ing. “Under the law a man is supposed to keep his stock where they’re supposed to be,” the forest administrator says, reasonably. “The regu¬ lations say repeated trespass [by animals] is grounds for reduction.” Reduction is officialese for saying a cow will not be allowed to eat the berries of the forest. A man like Cleofas is puzzled by this. He does not understand a law that tells a cow where to nibble the leaves of what berry bush, and then

8

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LA RAZA: THE MEXICAN AMERICANS

banishes the cow from the forest because it is enticed by an out-ofbounds berry. “These are questions in which there is a legitimate difference of opinion,” said former Undersecretary of Agriculture John A. Schnittker, after a flying tour of the villages and forests, where Cleofas and a dozen Hispano cattlemen cornered him, unexpectedly, and surrounded him with their vocal grievances. “You give more land to the rabbits than you give to us poor people,” Cleofas told the Undersecretary. “We are almost in a concentration camp,” Cleofas said. “The Forest Service is fencing all around the villages, so that in a few years we will all be in a concentration camp. In other words, we are oppressed. As a matter of fact, I think we are.” He rages at the fences. The forest rangers are fencing the forest with barbed wire, to keep the villagers’ herds from “overgrazing” on the forage of the wild life. Cleofas says in outrage, “I don’t feed my family with the elk.” He has heard of one village fenced so well by the barbed wire that the villagers tell him that they, not their cows, are being fenced in. “One day I see a forest ranger, who I know, posting signs on my land,” Cleofas says. “He is my friend, so I say to him, ‘Why are you posting signs?’T\.nd he says, ‘Cleofas, you have to move your fences. These signs tell where your land ends and the National Forest begins. You have to move your fences.’ “I say, ‘Not me.’ ' “He says, ‘Our surveys show that your fences are in the wrong place.’ “I say, ‘Maybe your surveys are in the wrong place. You move your surveys, not my fences.’ “And I see in the north his signs are twenty feet inside my land. In the south his signs are a little bit outside my land. So I say to him, ‘If you want my fences moved, you move them. But I tell you this: If you move my fences one inch inside my land, you better watch out! I will get my gun!’ ” Cleofas’ eyes grow cold. “I will make an army of one man if they touch my land.

prologue: Cleofas, the Man of the Earth

|

9

Sometimes I believe this. I believe these people in power are trying to inoculate, to contaminate, the poor farmer,” he says. “They want to take away what little we own, our forty acres, to really take it away from the poor farmer and let the big, rich people come and relax in this beautiful country. They would rather have us on the welfare rolls. Sometimes this is the way I think. Let’s say, I ‘suspect.’ A lot of people suspect this.” The suspicion of the stranger is widely held in the northern villages. And it is not a rural myopia. Yearly more than 15 million “strangers” were visiting New Mexico by the mid-1960’s. That’s fifteen “stran¬ gers” to every inhabitant. Worth more than $300 million annually, tourism is a cherished industry pampered by the state. “More than 10,000 sites of historic significance” have been officially “inventoried” by the Governor’s Commission on Historic Sites, for the sightseeing pleasure of those the villagers call the “stranger.” Every village has its designated historic site. The poor and quaint villages are merchandised by “scenic tours”; although the guides scrupulously avoid pointing out the “tierra o muerte” (“Land or Death ”) posters on the crumbling adobe walls. Hospitable as the villagers are by tradition, they have become cyni¬ cal and hostile. The spectacle of the vacationers with their expensive equipment coming into the dusty villages and enjoying the- dense forests from which their own herds have been barred is too much for even the irony in the Hispanos’ souls. On occasion their quiet antago¬ nism has erupted into fights with the forest rangers. A local Catholic priest voices the villagers’ feelings: “I think the Forest Service is more interested in where the middle class take their vacations than where the poor people graze their cattle.” A farmer, Delfin Quintana, of the village of Cebolla, told Under¬ secretary of Agriculture Schnittker, “I think it is the unwritten policy of the Forest Service to get rid of the poor farmer.” A young man from Rio Arriba County, who heads a statewide project of village self-help and redevelopment, Alex Mercure, writes sardonically of the “great expectations” that some officials have “for the development of the natural resources of the rural areas along tourist and recreation lines.” But then he adds, “This reflects the

10

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LA RAZA: THE MEXICAN AMERICANS

middle-class bias of the planners. Taos County is ranked fourth in tourist activity, but it also has the second lowest per capita income in the state. What tourist development has taken place has been of ben¬ efit only to commercial interests.” How many sheepherders can ski, Mercure asks. The old villagers cannot even afford the hunting, fishing, camping, and parking permits. So they violate the laws and get arrested, and they curse tourism. “Why do I pay to fish where I always fished?” says Cleofas. “Like a stranger?” “Tourism and recreation projects which would take water away from the small farmer and land from the small rancher do more harm than good,” says Father Robert Garcia, himself a former village priest and past director of the state of New Mexico’s Office of Economic Opportunity. “The poor, uneducated owner of a small herd, upon which he depends—partly—for bare subsistence does not understand. ... Range management may be necessary, but these permits represent financial income and food for people in extreme poverty conditions. The huge gap between the Forest Service and these people is appall¬ ing.” Cleofas is more pithy and angry. “In the Latin American countries what do the governments do with the people’s land? Year after year they have been dividing lands to many poor farmers so that they can make a living. Here in the United States they are taking the land away instead of dividing the public lands among the people. “What they will do next I don’t know. But I think they are going to succeed and not let us do anything. Just wait for the welfare check. That’s all. They take away our land and give us federal projects. In the old days nobody dreamed of federal projects, nobody dreamed of welfare. We don’t need anything like that. We don’t want alms from anybody. We need some of our lands back. All the people need is more land. More freedom. More elbow room.” Yet he stays on in this valley of his anger. Why doesn’t he pack up his family and get into his pickup truck and escape down the highway into the city? Why does he stay? Once he left the village, he says, like so many others, but like so few he came back. He did not like it in the city.

prologue:

Cleofas, the Man of the Earth

|

11

I lived in Denver. Yes, I work there for about twelve years. My two daughters and my son were born in Denver,” he says. “When we went to Denver you know what I worked for? Eleven dollars. Eleven dollars a week! And my wife, when she was going to give birth, we lived in one room. Just a shack. Then one day it burned down, our shack. Everything we owned was in that shack. My wife only had the dress she was wearing. And I only had the pants, the dirty pants, I was working in. We had nothing. I didn’t own anything in Denver but a job. And I wasn’t too sure of the job, either. I didn’t like the city for myself, but also for my children. When they were old enough to go to school I decided to come back to my humble land. I wanted my children to know how to work with soil, with the land.” In a battered wheelbarrow Cleofas mixes a tubful of cement with his shovel. Then he pours the cement into the mold of old boards that shapes the foundation of his earth cellar. “To keep vegetables for the winter,” he says. The rows of chili and beans and corn in his fields are few. His ancient trees bear fruit that is no longer sweet. But the land is patient. “It waits until I need it.” Up on the high slopes of the mountains the autumn is gathering. Summer is dying. The bluish air of the coming frost bites at Cleofas’ lips as he talks. He talks of plowing before the earth freezes. In his nostrils there is the odor of the coming snow. He knows it is too late to plow. He stands in his weedy and unseeded fields, thick with sage¬ brush and snakeweed and yellow stickleaf, and talks of plowing the stubborn earth nonetheless. He is a stubborn man. A gust of mountain wind blows through the fields. It rustles the weeds. Cleofas looks up and lays his shovel down, squinting know¬ ingly at the dark clouds that hover above the Blood of Christ Moun¬ tains. “We better go in maybe,” he says. In the pleasant and warm house we sit and sip coffee, while the television set tries vainly to bring the news of the world outside the valley into the village parlor. The image is out of focus on the screen. Blurred soldiers are dying before the cameras. “You think Cleofas is crazy!” he wryly says. “Who is crazy? Am

12

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LA RAZA: THE MEXICAN AMERICANS

1 crazy? In times of war it’s prosperity all over the country. But as soon as the war stops, depression comes. And I feel that by owning my few acres of land, if war stops, I will have something to eat. I can survive without food from the supermarket. On the land there is always food. I am getting ready. “During the depression the people of the cities starved,” he says. “We had food. We did not starve, like the people of the cities. We had food enough to feed the birds.” The night wind comes down the mountain. It rattles the windows. When it is dark the wind sounds louder than in the daytime. “I must go,” I say. Cleofas walks to the door with me. “There is a saying of our ances¬ tors: ‘Whoever sells his lands sells his mother,’ ” he says. “It’s a true saying. Land is what keeps you and me and everybody else. That’s why we value our land. That’s why I stay on my land. “Up in these mountains, these rough mountains, there is places that no human has touched. I have gone to a few. There is where there is peace, is quiet. And I believe there is where you get a touch of the Almighty God. Because it is clean. “See where the land, it’s messed up by humans? In these beautiful parks that the Forest Service creates for the tourists, how messy they are. “I can take you to some areas in these beautiful mountains, these high mountains that we have, that no humans have touched, and you will love to stay there—forever.” Cleofas Vigil has written an ode to his land. He calls it, “Mother of All Life—The Earth”: Ah, you who do not have false pride, Ah, brave companions, Though we have no money We travel hand in hand; Though barefoot we are happy With our belly heavy Full of green beans And gray Verdolagas. The poor man’s heart rejoices

prologue: Cleofas, the Man of the Earth When the fields are green With the delicious food That never wearies the hungry; The rounded tortillas Prepared in every style, Ah, what a tasty mouthful The fields provide for us. The sublime aroma Of green chilis in the hot embers, Cooked with gusto, Ready to be plucked; How it stirs the appetite Of a tired chicano. In the morning he awakes And goes into his garden; He quickly works up a sweat When he sees his crops Grow before his eyes; It delights his heart, He comes alive, knowing The earth, his mother Is going to feed him. My brother this is your mother, Mother, fertile and fruitful; If anyone takes her from you You will be an orphan; And from whose breasts Will you drink sweet milk, Be it of goat, Or be it of cow? The earth is your food, and your mother: I tell you once again.

13

PART ONE

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V

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Conquistador on a Motorcycle

The village of Antonchico is still. Not a goat goes out in the midday sun; it is too hot. Not a man walks on the street. The buzz of the flies and the whine of the supersonic jets are the only sounds in the white sky. Six men squat in the dust of the village. They talk, in whispers, of violent deeds that they intend to do to defend their ancestral lands and their manhood. They talk of murder. They talk, but not a man shifts an inch from his squat in the shadow of the adobe house. “We are men of silent violence,” says a farmer. On a lazy old mare a young boy rides down the main street, the only street, of the village. The boy on the horse rides by in slow motion, as though he is asleep. The houses hide from the blazing sun. Even the gossiping women are sequestered behind the thick walls of adobe, for it is the time of siesta, and it is uncivilized to work, or walk, or talk loudly at the noon hour. A priest squats in the dust beside the villagers. He is wearing an open shirt and dirty Western chinos. He balances himself expertly, so that the seat of his trousers is poised safely above the prickly sage¬ brush. “It is so peaceful,” I say to the priest. “So is a volcano,” he replies.

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He is a hothead, this priest, so they say. I scoff at his intense words, but he merely smiles and says, “Do not be fooled by the silence. The old farmer who squats beside us listens to our talk, but pretends not to hear. His eyes are alert as a small bird’s and his face is innocent. “He is peaceful,” I say to the priest. “In the village they say he has killed two men,” the priest says matter-of-factly. The old man gazes into my eyes with a kindly and distant look. He says nothing. “Who did he kill?” I ask skeptically. The priest whispers, “It is what they say. Some men tried to kill him. He killed two of them. Who knows?” A young farmer who has heard this looks up. He breaks a twig in his hand and he jabs the broken ends into the earth, hard. “That is the way it is here,” he says, then is silent once more. “In the night I hear a rifle shot,” the young farmer says, after a pause. He is answering a question no one has asked him. “And then there is this telephone call. A man says, ‘If you don’t watch your step we will kill your son.’ He hangs up and they cut the telephone wire. My wife, she is frightened.” His face is troubled by the memory. “That is how it is here.” “They cut my fences. And they steal two of my cows,” says another farmer. He smiles with tight lips. “If they come again, I kill them.” A boy who has been silent among his elders—he is a student work¬ ing in the village during the summer—says very seriously, “If it were up to me I would go to them with a gun and kill them. Probably I would do that.” Who are they? None of the villagers will say. “I do not say who,” says a third farmer. He is taller than the others, maybe stronger, with a pebbly face and hands made of bones. “But I tell you this,” and his words are hard. “The Spanish people are angry now. Now all the Spanish people have a good rifle. I visit many villages and I tell you this. Everyone has a rifle now.” The old man among them speaks. He speaks in quiet Spanish that cannot be translated. What he says is something like this: They have taken our land and stolen it. They have taken our crops and stolen

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them. They have taken our manhood, and broken it. They have taken our Spanish language, and dirtied it. They have taken our children into their schools, and made them rude. “We have been under the feets of so many of the stranger,” the old man suddenly says in English. “The stranger?” I ask. “Yes,” he says, “the stranger who came from the East. Who took our land. Who pushes us around. They have done dirty things to the people of these villages. They did it to my ancestors. They keep on doing it to me. And they think that they are going to do it to my sons and grandsons, but they have another think coming. I tell you they will fight.” “Now, we will all fight,” the old man says. Each man is lost in his own shadow. In the other villages do the men feel this way? No one will say. How can they tell me what they think in another village? Every village is different. “Is any man like any other man?” “Who can speak for me?” a farmer says. “No one but me. That’s who I speak for.” In the city the officials tell me that these village men are not “typi¬ cal” of the men of Antonchico and that the men of Antonchico are not “typical” of the men of the villages. Some of the villagers are defeated, apathetic, and torn by self-anger and humiliation. Some of the villagers are easygoing, immune to the outside world, and tend to laugh off history. These things are more “typical” of the villagers’ feelings, they say. “Typical!” spits a farmer, when I tell him of this analysis. “You know who is typical? In the city everybody is typical, because you can’t live in the city unless you are typical of everybody else.” “But not everybody is as angry as here.” “I am not angry.” He laughs. “When I am angry I will not talk about it. Then it will be too late to talk. Angry? We are just thinking, how do you say, out loud? Yes, a man who talks about what he will do will not do it.” The farmer’s words become a whisper. “We are not the black man. If we do something, we will not tell you about it first.”

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“What will you do?” “Ah. Who knows?” The haze of the sun diffuses the houses of the village. It looks unreal and faded. Quaint as a picturesque postcard the houses of Antonchico rise out of the adobe mud. But the adobe is cracking. Some of the houses are collapsing into the earth from which they emerged genera¬ tions ago. Hours of the afternoon fall upon the six men who squat and talk. It grows later, it is three o’clock. Who knows the time? In the sky above the village the mirage of time shimmers and is gone. The wrath of the squatting men evaporates in the sun, but they hardly notice it vanish, for they are watching the village come to life again, as it always does after the noon. El Viejo, the oldest man, is whittling the statue of a saint. Or is it the head of J.F.K.? He uses a daggerlike knife, almost as his grandfa¬ ther did. The children run barefoot, for their sneakers are under a bush. On the adobe walls the strings of red chili ripen in the sun. The chili is hung from a television wire. In the yards of the houses the goats are separated by fences of twigs and branches tied by nylon cord. The road has been paved. But it is full of holes. Now the village has three stores and a not-quite-new school and some of the adobes have tin roofs and the inevitable television antennas. Since the old days things have changed. But not much. The village still looks like a village in Old Mexico, not New Mexico. Six hundred people lived here when the army of General Kearny conquered New Mexico, and today the number of villagers is about the same. The same families live in the same houses. The farmers plow the same fields their fathers, and grandfathers, and great-grand¬ fathers, and great-great-grandfathers plowed. The saying in the village is “Lo Que Puede”—That Which Can Be Is Enough—for this is the land of “Poco Tiempo, ” the land of Pretty Soon, and the land of “Que Importa?”-—What Does It Matter? The sun does not change, it merely turns. Nothing stirs the seasons of the sun but the Almighty—“As God Wills.” In a mountain village of southern Colorado near the New Mexico border there are turnstiles on the gates of the City Hall, to keep out

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the cows. The villagers say that when the king of Spain issued a royal land grant to their ancestors, hundreds of years ago, he ordained that the town plaza be a common pasture where every man’s cows could graze freely. The highway has since been built through the village, and cows are rare on the highway, but the wishes of their ancestors must be obeyed. Cows are free to graze on any grass that is left on Main Street. If a cow is clever enough to get through the turnstiles on the lawn of the City Hall, that too is her pasture. Ah, the sleepy villages of the Southwest. The life of the unhurried villagers is romantic to the dreamer. Most of all to the stranger. Eighty years ago a Victorian dropout from Harvard wandered into these villages. He was enchanted by the land where “nature does little more than sleep.” The romantic vision of Charles F. Lummis has since become one of the lovelier stereotypes of the Southwest. In his The Land ofPoco Tiempo, written in 1884, he rhapsodized: “ ‘Picturesque’ is a tame word for it. It is a picture, a romance, a dream, all in one. It is a land of quaint, swart faces, of Oriental dress and unspelled speech; a land where distance is lost and the eye is a liar.” Journeying to the land of enchantment from the old Trinity Parish in the Wall Street area of New York, where he was curate, the Rever¬ end Ross Calvin was equally charmed by the villages, half a century later. The Episcopalian minister thought he had discovered a nevernever land where “the motto of the people [is] manana, manana,” and “where manana is like the yesterdays.” Calvin, in The Sky Determines, written in 1948, was sternly critical of the “unproductive indolence [that] flowers the quality that endears Mexicans to travelers, artists and writers—their quaintness.” He was charmed, nonetheless. “Liv¬ ing among them, one grows at length to comprehend with compassion their backward indolence, their credulity and gaiety,” he wrote. Where Lummis thought the villagers to be “dreamy,” Calvin thought of them as “adorable.” Romantic dreams persist, as romantic dreams must, not merely in the idyls of the exiles from the East, on the travel posters, and in the fiestas for the tourists, but also in the dry scholarship of the social scientists, who need to dream too. The image of “the romantic, the picturesque, the charming” villagers of New Mexico has reappeared,

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as late as 1967, in the foreword written by Professor Joan Moore, Associate Director of the University of California’s Mexican-Ameri¬ can Study Project, to an otherwise realistic paper called The Spanish Americans of New Mexico.

“Let them dream their dreams,” says a farmer when we talk of this. “When you sleep on a dirt floor you dream a different dream. It is not so much romantic.” Some of the villagers are starving. In the adobe huts the old people sit in the dark, with no electricity, no water, no food, waiting for “the welfare.” Half of the families do not earn enough to reach the govern¬ ment-approved “poverty line.” The farmers often work as migrants on the farms of the “strangers,” for the village has lost more than twothirds of its ancestral land to these “strangers.” Many who own land do not farm at all. They are too poor to buy tractors or seed. They, too, are hungry. It is the crudest irony to starve in farm country. The village is too poor to afford a doctor. Or a dentist. In one village the sick have to go ninety miles to the nearest doctor. But the sick of Antonchico are more fortunate. A doctor comes once a week. One of every two village families is poor in New Mexico, if they are Hispanos. So low is the income of these families that more than half —53.3 per cent in the rural areas and 57.9 per cent on the farms—earn less than the poverty level of $3,000 yearly. In the rural regions there is “widespread physical and mental weak¬ ness, from hunger, malnutrition and poverty,” admits Governor Da¬ vid Cargo. Poverty is endemic; but in nearby Mora County an unbelievable 68 per cent of the Hispano families exist below the pov¬ erty line. The New Mexico State Employment Security Commission, after surveying the six “hunger counties” designated by the National Citizens Board of Inquiry, reports the condition “shameful.” Rio Arriba County, in the mountain country, is a “pocket of hun¬ ger” so abysmal, the State Commission reports, that “the existing nutritional deficiencies, the need for dental, medical, correctional physical therapy, corrective eye lenses, and cases of retardation be¬ cause of lack of improved home diets, are of major concern.” A school principal in Rio Arriba County tells the investigators that many students in his school say “the only full meal they eat” all day

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is the meager school lunch. He clinically notes that children are “fa¬ tigued” in school “because of their weak condition”; they are starving. In the village of Ojo Caliente eye doctors do a random check of sixty-one schoolchildren. The Commission reports that fifty of the children are found to need eyeglasses but cannot afford them. Medical examinations are given to thirty of these poor children; fifteen are discovered to be in immediate need of medical attention, and three children are hospitalized at once. Half of the children “received cloth¬ ing to continue in school.” Some of the children have such decayed teeth that they “cannot eat their school lunches,” it is reported. Almost all of the village children show some signs of malnutrition. In Taos County an educator reports a “problem of malnutrition” that he “compares [to] living conditions of some war-ravaged families [he had] seen in Korea.” Unemployment in the rural villages is so much an accepted fact of life that it often goes unreported. In the winter of 1965 the unemploy¬ ment rate in Taos County, for example, was officially stated to have “decreased” to 17 per cent. But that winter an investigator for the State Employment Security Commission, David Sandoval, personally conducted a house-by-house survey of 887 adult villagers in Taos County, and found almost half of them, 431, were jobless, and “cur¬ rently seeking work.” They were “too proud” to report their lack of jobs, or did not see the point in bothering, or were ignored by the official statistics. “Lack of employment was cited as a big factor in malnutrition,” dryly comments the Albuquerque Journal. / One school nurse in Sandoval County tells of visiting the poor family of a schoolchild in a rural village who had hung a sign on the door of their house that simply said: WE ARE HUNGRY

“We live in a conspiracy of silence,” says Fecundo Valdez. He is a rural organizer in the mountain villages of New Mexico. One of that new breed of university graduates, wearing a Pancho Villa mustache and a dashing sombrero on whose brim he has pinned a “Grapes of

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Wrath” button, Valdez travels the dirt roads to the hidden villages, for the agencies of the government and the universities. He comes from such a village himself. “The people have a distaste, an anger, a hostility, to the things that have been done to them. But they say little,” he says. “In the past these villages were not allowed to participate in real decision making. So they withdrew into their own circles, into silence. If you don’t have the means to actively resist what is done to you, then what happens is that you become passively aggressive. It is a basic resistance. It may be dormant, it may be apathetic, but it may be harnessed. “Silence is a way of resisting, you know,” Valdez says. “It has been the way of the villages—until now.” The visitor who drives off U.S. Highway 84 into the village hears only the silence. He will think he has entered a valley of pastoral peace. He will not see the circle of men who squat in the dust of the adobes. Even if he did, their low voices would be stifled in the dust, as silent as the heat. Now, in whispers, every man boasts of a feat of his fists. He tells of fights fought in the daylight in highway bars and in the dark of night on country roads, real and imaginary. Every man tries to outboast his neighbor, and succeeds. “In the mountains the people reflect the personality of the mountains,” the priest says. “Life can be ruthless and violent in the mountains.” He tells a tale: “In a village meeting there was a man who came from the govern¬ ment who spoke, and he promised the people work in a new factory that would soon be built. “An old man in the back of the room, a very old man, got up. The old man said, ‘You say you are going to bring us a factory. We don’t even have a paved road. Why don’t you bring us a paved road? Our people watch the TV. We see the four-lane highways in Santa Fe. We see our dirt road. We are not dumb dogs. So why do you talk to us like dumb dogs? We do not believe you.’ “The old man said, .‘Listen to what we ask, don’t tell us what we need. It may take arms, I think, before you people will listen to us.’ ” And the young priest bows his head, upset by his recitation of the

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old man’s words. “What the hell drives an old man to say a thing like that?” “Here, in northern New Mexico, the people of the villages react slower than the people of the ghettos,” Valdez says. “The distances are greater. The problem of communication from village to village is more difficult. But if something isn’t done to help the rural villagers, it will happen here. “You will not see riots,” Valdez says. The farmer will not burn down his own village, his own house, his own fields! Valdez nods: “It might be the forests. In the ghettos it is the slums that go up in flames. Here it might be forests of the government. Lots of people are talking about this. If they can’t get access to their grazing lands in the [National] forests, they say: ‘We will set fire to the forests.’ ” The six men squatting in the dust stir. Such talk in a public place makes them uneasy. When I repeat these thoughts of Valdez there is no response. “We are not people that believe in violence,” thb old man says. “I suppose that’s why we have been pushed around so much. The Anglos might think we are coward. But the Spanish-speaking people have shown how coward they have been on the battlefields, in the First World War, the Second World War, Korea, and now Vietnam. We are not coward. But we are not people of violence. I hope that will never happen. For myself, I don’t believe in that. “I don’t know, but the people in the future might have to get violent.” The young farmer inscribes a circle in the dust with his twigs; his circle grows smaller and smaller until he jabs the sticks into its heart, like two spears. No one says another word. Even the young and volatile priest is still. One man arises. In the circle of squatting men, he has spoken the least, for he is the spokesman of the land-grant heirs of the village of Antonchico—the man they call H.H. “We are a little angry,” he says softly. H. H. Mondragon is a sparse man, with a slight body. It is difficult to know what he has been thinking, for his face is somber and his lips are smiling. Nothing about him seems imposing, not even his height

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as he stands; yet there is a dignity in his bearing, and the men seem to respect him. “I will tell you why we are angry here,” he says. “Come to La Loma, to my house.” It is all he says. Striding off, he mounts a bright-red motorcycle, like a young man. The Japanese motorcycle, new and shining in the sun, was given him by his son, the one who is a priest. H. H. Mondragon revs the engine until it roars, professionally, dons his blue crash helmet with a mod¬ ernized thunderbird on its crest, tightens the leather strap under his chin, and goes thundering off down the dirt road. The descendant of a conquistador on a Japanese motorcycle. He shatters the silence. The dust rises, like a storm, in the village of Antonchico.

ii

The Black Swords of H. H. Mondragon

The blackened blades of H. H. Mondragon’s swords are crossed on the adobe wall of his cottage. On the wide and thick blades are written the words “Charomagno” and “Bonaparte,” for Charlemagne and Napo¬ leon. In the crux of the crossed swords is an offering of palm leaves from the Mass of Palm Sunday. Christ’s pale face gazes at these instruments of death and resurrection from across the room. In the house of an ordinary farmer these swords might be an incredi¬ ble sight. Not here; they seem entirely proper to this gentleman who graciously welcomes his guest with a diffident bow. “Forgive the house of a man who lives alone,” he says—a needless apology, for his rooms are as neat and fastidious as he. He is dressed for the occasion in the formal Spanish tradition of the West, wearing a bright-red cowboy shirt and highly polished workboots. H. H. Mondragon excuses himself; in a moment he returns bearing a tray of coffee cups that he sets down on a wooden crate. “Come, seat yourself. Who can have words without coffee?” When I lean back in the chair an annoying fly buzzes in my hair. Looking over my shoulder I see that the fly is a revolver hanging from the hatrack in its holster. On the wall is a hunting rifle. He sees that I am uneasy about the guns, especially the revolver snout that nuzzles my ears.

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“Rabbits,” H. H. Mondragon says. “It is an old gun, but faster than the rabbits.” “And the swords?” “The swords are memories.” H. H. Mondragon is a man who lives in history, as some men live in dreams. Not a dream of the past, for the past lives in him. History is one of his few luxuries. It is his indulgence in dignity. Like the black swords, it is visible on his walls, it is in his bones, it is even under his bed. Kneeling on his adobe floor, he gropes in the dark under his bed. “What are you looking for?” “I will show you why the people are angry.” He kneels, cursing in the dark. “Here I have the deeds. Somewhere.” “The deed to your land?” “Our land!” says H. H. Mondragon. “They have taken our land away—one-quarter of a million acres they have taken from us in this valley. It is the truth. The President of the United States signed our deed himself.” He at last finds what he is searching for. “You will see,” he says. Under the high old-fashioned bed, with its curlicued headboards of iron, there is an ancient trunk. He bends low and tugs at it. The trunk is heavy with the burden of his memories. In the trunk are faded photographs and mildewed newspapers. He takes out a folder mottled by weather and age. On the cover are the words: ANTON CHICO LAND GRANT DOCUMENTS

1822 = 1878 PROPERTY OF H. H. and R. A. MONDRAGON

He fondles them with his fingers and reluctantly hands them to me. “History of our land,” he says. “But why hide them?” “We are liars they say. We dream it. We imagine it is our land. Here are the proofs,” he says. “So, I have to guard them.” “Under your bed?” “I sleep with the revolver beside my head sometimes. No one will come here.” The documents are old court records decorated with the gaudy

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penmanship of the 1800’s in the scrolls of a quill pen. One of the oldest papers tells of the coming of the earliest Mexican farmers to the valley of Antonchico. It is dated the 22nd of January in the year of 1822. That day “Salvador Tapia and sixteen others” arrived with a land grant in their saddlebags, but were “driven off by Indians,” it says. Undaunted, the settlers returned in the spring, and the antique document tells of how on the 2nd of May the “Governor Melgaris is purported to have granted the land to Manuel Rivera and thirty-six men, and directed Manuel Baca, the Constitutional Justice of El Vado, to place the parties in possession, which was done. . . .” The land grant of Antonchico is then marked “approved” by the “Surveyor General’s Office, Santa Fe, July 15, 1859. William Pelham, Surveyor General.” Stone by stone the land grant of Antonchico was measured. The Mexican Government had awarded these farmers, who dared venture into what was then Comanche territory, a small kingdom of 378,570 and a half acres. Exactly. The ancient trunk of H. H. Mondragon is a modern Pandora’s box of real-estate myth. In its musty recesses is a curious document of six and a half long and single-spaced pages that details the vastness of the land grant. Inch by inch, measured by the links of a chain, the acreage is itemized. Walk, the deed says, “seven miles, eight link [of chain], to a sandstone, thirty-six by twenty-four by five inches in size, marked A.C.E.B., on facing grant, with stone mound, the same being due South of Sabino Springs, two chains and twenty links from a cotton¬ wood twelve inches in diameter, bear north nineteen degrees west, ninety links distance a cottonwood, thirteen inches in* diameter . . .” and so on and on and on. In the end it proclaims: “In Testimony Whereof, I Chester A. Ar¬ thur, President of the United States, have caused these letters to be made Patent, and the Seal of the General Land Office to be hereunto affixed. Given under my hand at the City of Washington this twenty seventh day of March in the year of Our Lord one thousand eight hundred and eighty three, and of the Independence of the United States, the one hundred and seventh, by the President Chester A. Arthur.” And it is signed with a flourish.

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“So I do not lie, you see.” “It is impressive.” “Pieces of paper!” he laughs in disgust. “What good are these old papers? What happened to this land grant is not written on pieces of paper.” “Where is it written?” “In my blood,” H. H. Mondragon says, as to a child. “The land has a long history of blood. I do not know it all. No one knows it; the history of blood cannot be written on pieces of paper. The lawyers of the Anglos think history is pieces of paper. So I keep these deeds.” “Who knows the history of blood?” “Listen, I will tell you a little,” says H. H. Mondragon. “I know a little of one little man in one little village.” Coronado passed this way. It is known that he came into the valley of Antonchico in 1541. The conquistador, a young man not quite thirty and wearing plumed armor overlaid with gold, led his motley army of 256 Spaniards, 1,000 Mexican Indians, and an African—“the most brilliant company ever assembled in the Indies to go in search of new lands”—through the “Journey of Death,” onto the buffalo plains of the Comanches, and into the valley that spring. He was a medieval soldier, of whom it was said he raped the Indians’ land and seduced the Indians’ women. He left a trail of blood, the Spaniards’ blood, in the waters of the Pecos River and the red clay of Antonchico. Seeking the fabled Seven Cities of Cibula, the General Francisco Vasquez de Coronado found himself instead on the prosaic prairies of Kansas. That discovery so disheartened him that he hurried back, through the valley of Antonchico, and into history. The hunters of the Comanche tribe pitched their summer camps on these riverbanks while hunting the herds of buffalo that covered the plains to the east. Coronado was guided by these Comanche trails. Without these his soldiers might have died. It was brutal country of deathly deserts and bleak mountains and fierce suns that shone with¬ out mercy on the armor of the explorers. Men were known to drink their own blood to wet their lips. Was it the conquistadors who christened the mountains—the Blood of Christ, the Sangre de Cristo? It is not known. But the old villagers

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say that long, long ago the village of Antonchico was known as Sangre de Cristo. It is known that when Don Juan de Onate settled and seeded the Kingdom of Nuevo Mexico in 1598, he too journeyed through the valley of Antonchico. He too led a pilgrimage in which the Indians outnumbered the Spaniards, though history forgets this. A penitent of the Third Order of Saint Francis, he was as cruel as the land. He once ordered that every Indian man of the Acoma Pueblo who fought his benediction have his right foot cut off. Yet, de Onate brought the first Spanish farmers to New Mexico. Whether there was a Mondragon in the bravado army of Coronado, or in the agony of de Onate, is unknown. H. H. Mondragon has no ancestral memory of it, though it may be. It is known that not long after, the Mondragon family entered the history of Nuevo Mexico officially on a piece of paper. In the Archives of the Indies in Seville, Spain, the brittle papers are inscribed with the name of a Juan Alonso Mondragon, who in the year of 1629 rode as escort on the wagon trains of supplies that journeyed into the Kingdom of Nuevo Mexico. He became a captain in the king’s army and later the high sheriff of Santa Fe. And in the National Archives of Mexico there is mention of a Juan de Mondragon, who may or may not have been the same man, who was Regent of Santa Fe in 1637—a “poor man” it was written of him even then. When the Pueblo Indian revolt of 1680 drove out the Spaniards, he was an old man. He fled with the refugees as he had come, in poverty, a conquistador of dubious conquests. His son, Sebastian Mondragon, who was a native-born New Mexi¬ can, returned with the Reconquest, in 1689, when the army of Don Diego de Vargas recaptured the land and resettled the burned-out villages. Sebastian’s intimacy with the life and languages of the Indians he grew up among earned him the difficult job of interpreting for the triumphant army of de Vargas. The young man looked Indian. A description of Sebastian Mon¬ dragon in 1681 as a man of “medium build, swarthy complexion, with black hair” might be that of the twin of H. H. Mondragon in 1968. “I think there is Spanish and Indian blood in my veins,” says H. H.

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Mondragon. “Some blood runs thin. One grandfather of mine was French, but that hardly tells. My grandmother, who I remember well, very well, had black hair to her waist and black eyes. She must have had much of Indian blood. “Some blood runs thick. My Indian blood is thick, I think.” The irony of Sebastian’s intimacy with the Indians was that in the midst of his wedding feast, on December 27, 1693, the Tanos Indians decided to join the festivities by revolting once again against the dancing Spaniards in the old plaza of Santa Fe. Poor Sebastian and his bride barely survived their wedding day. After that the Mondragons left town. In the early 1700’s, the family sought solace in the cloistered mountain villages of Pojoaque and Santa Cruz. When the new government of Mexico sought to exercise the independence it had won from the Empire of Spain, in 1824, by imposing a land tax, the villagers rebelled. Taxes on their sacred lands? What sacrilege! The Chimayo Revolt of 1837 erupted in the very villages where the Mondragons had gone seeking peace; there are still Mondragons living in Chimayo. In an almost bloodless uprising, the Hispano farmers and Pueblo Indians defeated the lackadaisical army of the Mexican Governor, Albino Perez. His Excellency, in fleeing the battle of Santa Cruz, was captured by the Indians of the Santo Domingo Pueblo. And his captors cut off his head and sent the trophy by special messenger to the victorious rebels. Encouraged by the headless state of affairs, “the rabble of mixed bloods,” as one historian called them, marched on the capitol of Santa Fe, occupied it, and installed their own governor, an Indian of Taos, Jose Gonzales. It was one of the few times in American history that armed rebellion of the poor overthrew a government. And it was perhaps the only time that an Indian governed the equivalent of a state. Among the rebels were the Mondragons. “We always have been a stubborn family,” says H. H. Mondragon. “I was born stubborn, too. Maybe it is my Spanish and Indian blood.” When the rebels were overwhelmed by the successive onslaughts of the Mexican Army of General Manuel Armijo and the United States Army of General Stephen Kearny, they withdrew into their villages. Not for long, however. The Revolt of Taos broke out in 1847. Once again the Hispano farmers and Pueblo Indians joined arms, this time

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in opposition to their newest conquerors, and killed the newly ap¬ pointed American Governor, Charles Bent, in the Governor’s Man¬ sion. The United States Army ended the rebellion when it besieged and leveled the Catholic Church—the Mission of San Geronimo (Saint Jerome)—and the Taos Pueblo, where the insurgents were thought to be hiding. In truth, the revolt of 1847 and that of 1837 had been secretly led by some of the young Spanish priests in the villages. Father Jose Martinez of Taos was the best known, but there were many more rebels in robes of the Church. Leaders of the rebellion were executed. “The Spanish and Indian people hung together,” says Fecundo Valdez. “Literally, they were hung by the neck.” It was out of this tumult that the family of the Mondragons came into the valley of Antonchico. Where the Pecos River spurts out of the Blood of Christ Mountains it twists onto the treacherous dry plains to Texas. The red water flows swift and shallow through the alkaline flats of the Llano de Estacado, the treeless and stark plains that early explorers named “The Ameri¬ can Sahara,” for the wastes of the Llano stretch upon a plateau of sixty thousand square miles. It is a country unto itself. Captain Randolph Marcy, who surveyed the terrain for the United States Army in the 1840’s, declared it the “great Sahara of North America.” He despaired of the “illimitable desert prairie,” where “even the savages dare not venture to cross . . . except at two or three places where they know water can be found.” The Llano was the highway of the conquistadors, the hideout of the Comancheros, the battlefield of the Texans, and the new home of the Mondragons. No wonder the Hispanos named it the Llano de Es¬ tacado—literally, The Flat Plains Staked Out for Fighting Duels. Into the Llano, a few years after the farmers of Antonchico settled on their land grant, came the Texans. The Republic of Texas had decided in 1836 that all the land east of the Rio Grande—half of New Mexico—was really part of Texas; and that included the village of Antonchico. When the villagers ignored their annexation, the Texas Legislature went further, voting in a Joint Resolution of both Houses in 1842 that the boundaries of Texas were hereby extended across all of New Mexico, to include upper and lower California, Arizona,

34

LA RAZA: THE MEXICAN AMERICANS

Sonora, and Chihuahua, and large parts of the Mexican states of Tamalulipas, Coahuila, Sinaloa, and Durango. In all, the Republic of Texas had grown by 500 million acres in one Joint Resolution. It legalized the fantasy of the President of Texas with the wonderful name of Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, who in his inaugural address of 1838 had envisioned Texas as stretching “to the Pacific and away to the Southwest as far as the obstinacy of the enemy may render it necessary for the sword to make the boundary.” Old Sam Houston, who was President of Texas in 1842, when the fantasy was voted, vetoed it as “visionary” at that time. The villagers of Antonchico heard the rumors of war and corralled their sheep and daughters. In fact, the army of Texas had invaded the Llano in 1841, five years before the war against Mexico. General McCleod led that invasion to establish “commercial relations” with Mexico. He attempted to cross the Llano, “well armed with artillery.” But his men nearly died of thirst and hunger, and the army of General Armijo easily defeated the invaders. Once captured, the remnants of the Texas army were led under arrest into the village of Antonchico. Old-timers recalled later how the village “boys climbed the corn cribs and brought down ears of corn for the hungry Texans.” Less gracious was the Hispanos’ welcome for the army of General Kearny, when the conquest of New Mexico was begun in earnest. “It is one of the big myths of American history that General Kearny came to New Mexico and took it without firing a shot,” says Fecundo Valdez, the rural organizer. “You can still find older people here who can relate the experiences of their fathers and grandfathers who fired shots. In the town of Las Vegas there was fighting. In the village of Mora the people burned the village down and fled to the mountains. In Taos, you remember, Governor Bent was killed. “History is a lie if you know only one side. The people in the villages resisted where they could.” The guerrilla warfare divided New Mexico for years thereafter. So intense were the tensions between the villagers and the invaders that for four years the Territory of New Mexico remained under the mili¬ tary rule of the United States Army. After General Kearny marched his army of the West into New Mexico, he responded to the hostility of the Hispanos by lecturing to

The Black Swords of H. H. Mondragon

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35

them. In the village streets of Las Vegas, he climbed on top of an adobe building, and to the villagers—most of whom understood only Spanish he said in English, “We come among you for your benefit, not for your injury.” Later the General implored the people of Santa Fe, “We come as friends, to better your condition. . . . You are now become American citizens. ... I am your governor.” Juan Bautista Vigil, the Mexican Governor, as courteously as he could, replied to the General, “Do not find it strange if there has been no manifestation of joy and enthusiasm in seeing this city occupied by your military forces. To us the power of the Mexican Republic is dead. No matter what, her condition she was our mother. What child will not shed abundant tears at the tombs of his parents? “We are aware of the unfortunate condition of the Poles,” Governor Vigil said, alluding to Czarist Russia’s conquest of Poland, an allusion that Kearny’s dragoons from Missouri must have thought peculiar. And yet what could not be done by war alone was at last won in the violent peace that came in the war’s wake. The cowboys were to conquer the land where the soldiers had only occupied it. The huge cattle herds in western Texas had by 1870 so depleted the prairies that the seas of grass were eroded by dry gullies. Droughts and blizzards forced the ranchers to seek rangelands further westward. “With range growing scarce efforts were made to open new lands to grazing,” wrote Edward Everett Dale in his Cow Country. And then, in 1875, the barbed-wire fence was brought to Texas. Barbed wire, recalls the old Hispano folk saying, marked the begin¬ ning of the end of the unfenced freedoms of the West, and the death of Hispano society: “Cuando vino el alambre, vino el hambre"^With the coming of the wire, hunger came”). Cowboys riding into the Llano were on their last roundup. When the cattle entered the unfenced sheep pasture of the Hispanos of the Llano, one family, the de Bacas, had flocks of more than one million sheep, and they fought the intruders with a small army. The range wars that erupted between the sheepherders and the cattlemen were in reality battles between Hispanos and Anglos; in a sense these battles were an aftermath of the War against Mexico; and in some ways they were bloodier. It was guerrilla war, not merely range war. “Sheepmen?” says a villager. “That meant us, the Spanish, the

36

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LA RAZA: THE MEXICAN AMERICANS

Mexicans. In the old days they say we smell like sheep, we act like sheep, we make love with sheep, we are sheep.” “That is because they were wolves,” says H. H. Mondragon. One of these guerrilla wars was the Lincoln County War in New Mexico, which lasted from 1876 to 1878. The hostilities were halted by the United States Army, under the rule of Governor Lew “Ben Hur” Wallace, but before it was ever, the hired gunmen of the ranch¬ ers had hanged or shot dozens of Hispano vaqueros and Anglo cow¬ boys, burned hundreds of barns and farm buildings, and ravaged whole towns. President Hayes finally had to call out the federal troops to restore order and ensure the victory of the cattlemen. The Lincoln County War shaped a myth when it catapulted a paranoiac killer into our folklore—William H. Bonney, known more affectionately as Billy the Kid. He had been the hired gun of the ranchers. The Kid came to Antonchico afterward. He was just one more cowboy passing through, but villagers remember that he did stay long enough to steal a few horses before he was chased to Stinking Springs, where he was captured and killed. As always, the village of Antonchico was on the crossroads of history. Will Hale, a cowboy chronicler of the range wars in Lincoln County, where he fought with Billy the Kid, tells of his riding “to a Mexican town named Antonchico” looking for a village to shoot up to relieve their tensions. “We had not been there long until about twenty Bar Z boys came in and shot the town up and ran most of the Mexicans out,” Hale writes. “The Bar Z was a cattle brand and their ranch was close to the town. Then the men they had were Americans and the people said it was a common thing for them to shoot the gambling house full of holes. It was funny to me and Dixon [a cattleman] to see them shoot around the town.” The killing of Mexicans was an even more popular sport than shoot¬ ing up a town. Once when his father, a rancher in West Texas, was hunting for Mexicans, Hale recalls in his book Twenty-four Years a Cowboy and Rancher, “I wrote father a letter telling him I wanted to come out and help him shoot Mexicans and Indians, but father wrote me back a letter saying it would be better shooting crawfish than Indians and Mexicans.”

The Black Swords of H. H. Mondragon

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37

Historian A. M. Gibson, in homage to the naivete and honesty of this reminiscence of the “uninhibited West,” writes, “Killing a Mexi¬ can was like killing an enemy in the independent war that apparently each Texan waged, and since it was a conflict with historic scores to settle, the killing carried a sort of immunity with it. . . . Just as the mores of frontier folk, pastoral and agrarian, sanctioned a free destruc¬ tion of Indians, so the mores of the border must have done the same in regard to Mexicans.” One by one the sheepmen lost their pastures, and if they fought back they lost their lives. It was then that the villagers returned to the ancient tactics of the Indians. Some of them became Comancheros. Men who had been Comancheros were, until recently, still alive to tell of those days. “El Cuate” was one of these. He was the ranch cook on the de Baca estates, and in her We Fed Them Cactus the daughter of that noble family, Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, recalls this tough and belligerent old-timer who “was so much part of the land of the Llano that he might just have grown from the soil.” The aging vaquero, with his leathery skin and long red mustache, relived the rough days of land wars. “It took courage to face the Llano,” El Cuate said. His nickname, El Cuate, meant A Man Who Cannot Be Equaled; and his recitation demonstrated why he had been nicknamed. “The Comanche Indians had been friendly with the ciboleros” (a diminutive of vaquero, mean¬ ing little Mexican bulls), the old man said. “The Comanches resented the moving of the Texans and the other stockmen with their cattle into their land. Stealing cattle was a means of revenge which the Indians used against the cattle owners. The Comanches would meet us at our camps along the buffalo country. There we exchanged our goods [rifles] for cattle and horses that the Indians had driven from the unfenced lands of the cattle kings.” “The Americans around were the real racketeers in the business,” El Cuate complained. “They did the buying from us and would drive the loot to Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, and California, where they sold it at a great profit.” Banditry did not, however, halt Ihe herds. The fences of the cattle¬ men moved westward. In the village of Antonchico and the villages nearby the farmers cut

38

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the fences. The cattlemen brought the barbed wire with them; and when their lawyers filed deeds for the open range, they fenced it in. Wearing white hoods over their faces and riding their fastest horses, the villagers would go forth at night not only to cut fences, but to burn corrals and barns. In the mornings the cattlemen awoke to “miles and miles of their pasture and farmland fences cut into fragments.” The villagers who fought back were branded “bandidos.” If they were sheepherders lacking in legal guile and were caught, as they usually were, justice was so swift that they were often hanged with their hats on. The Weekly New Mexican of Santa Fe printed a typically casual notice of such a hanging in the spring of 1872: “One Pablo Padilla, who has been for a long time engaged in steal¬ ing stock, etc., was overtaken on Saturday by a fit of remorse (or something else) and hung himself on a tree near Peralta.” “Los Gorras Blancas,” the hooded night riders were called—the White Caps. When they rode out on a raid in some villages they prayed at a lay mass, as was fitting, for their costumes were based on the hooded robes of the Spanish Inquisition of the sixteenth century. On the Llano some of the villagers founded “Los Caballeros de Labor,” The Gentlemen of Labor. They organized a clandestine politi¬ cal party, “El Partido del Pueblo”—The Party of the People—to sup¬ port, by day, the peasant army of Minutemen, who fought by night. Some of the Hispanos who sought to compromise with the Anglos, to re-establish peace, founded their own party, the Union Party. Life in the villages became tense and communities divided. The corrido sing¬ ers sang: “They divided you within.” In the village of Antonchico the night riders were among the bold¬ est, they say; for year by year the farmers were losing the land grant. “We lost it,” Mondragon says. “What happened to the land?” I ask. “It’s gone. It’s washed away. Someone else got it,” he says. “The strangers have bought it away, leased it away, stolen it away, swindled it away. Our own people are so poor sometimes they have to sell their land for the candles and a coffin when someone dies. Land for candles and a coffin! Is that right?” He stands up and he walks to the doorway. He gazes out at his

The Black Swords of H. H. Mondragon

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“garden,” as he calls his land. The farm is small, but it is the only inheritance that he has left of the history of his family, and he talks about it as though it was his child. The courtyard is a quagmire of blood-red clay, for it has rained heavily in the night. His battered pickup truck is splattered with drops of the red clay. So is his new Japanese motorcycle. The red rivulets of clay are trickling between the bean plants. It is as though the earth is bleeding. “Whenever it rains it is like this,” he says. “The rain washes the land clean. My garden is small, but it is green. How beautifully green it is after a rain. If I had enough water and enough land, how beautifully green I would make it. “A few years ago this was still open range,” he says. “Every man could run his cattle—he just turned them loose. Every man could plow wherever he could water. Then the United States Government started the money loans to the strangers. And the strangers began to buy up our cattle and lease our lands. When we opened our eyes our land was leased. The strangers had it all. “If we had our land we wouldn’t need no welfare, no OEO, no Community Action Programs. We want our land back. It’s our land. “Some say it is time for the White Caps again. Some say we must become Los Gorras Blancas again. I hope not. We have legal ways. We have lawyers. We have everything but justice.” He stands looking at his “garden.” “Who will do justice?”

Ill

The Stones of the Poor

On the little hill of La Loma not far from the village of Antonchico there is an old schoolhouse of stone. It has stood for one hundred years or more on the windy hilltop. With thick stone walls and a bell tower on its peaked roof, it was once a fortress where the villagers sought refuge from the raiding Comanches and invading Texans. The schoolhouse has been empty for years. Ever since the village schools were consolidated it has been unused. Horses graze in the schoolyard. The men of the villages, illiterate men, now have occupied the schoolhouse. Stone by stone they are building a new kind of school. It will be a school where the poor villagers will teach each other. Unlike “the school of the stranger” this one will “belong to us,” they say; and so they are building it with their own hands. “We dig the stone, by hand. We cut the stone, by hand. We lift the stone, by hand,” H. H. Mondragon says. “Sometimes it takes two men to lift a stone, it is so heavy.” There is cruelty in a stone. Hewn from the hills, by hand, and lugged by oxen in the old days, and nowadays by pickup truck, the stone is the bone of the earth and resists the hands of men. Yet the hands of these villagers have outwitted the stones before by joining hands.

The Stones of the Poor

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“I always say we have to work together,” says H. H. Mondragon. ‘Now, with these stones, we have no choice. We have no machines. We have just our hands.” “Nature is a wise teacher,” the old farmer says. “Our old schoolhouse has lasted forever, until now,” says Piacomo Ortega, a vigorous young farmer who is the elected director of the La Loma school. “We want to build well. So the new school lasts as long as the old one did.” “These stones will last forever,” H. H. Mondragon assures him. In the schoolhouse the “students” are farmers and so are the teach¬ ers. Some of the old men have never been inside a classroom before. The young men, sons of farmers, have come to teach their fathers. One of the young men has returned to the village from the university. He says, “I am learning more than I teach.” “Why did you come to a village school?” he is asked. “School? It is not just a school. It is one battle in our fight for self-determination. La Raza arriba!” the university student says. “Our people arise!” On the scaffolding of the school they are building the villagers sit with workboots caked with red clay and study. The lesson for today may be carpentry, or village power politics, or use of an electric saw, or citizenship, or how to run a cooperative store. A classroom may be anywhere. There are hammers in the classroom, instead of books. “How do you spell hammer? In English? In Spanish?” There are boxes of medicines, shovels, tape recorders, and movie screens; for these are the textbooks of a guerrilla war against ignorance. “If you fight poverty with education you have to fight whatever and whoever keeps you poor,” says Piacomo Ortega. “Education cannot lie. Education cannot serve the hypocrite.” “Revolutionary!” writes the local newspaper. The schoolhouse is besieged, once more. Not this time by the Indi¬ ans and the Texans, but by the respectable citizens of the village. Curses and accusations are hurled in village meetings. The local news¬ paper at Santa Rosa has charged that “revolutionary” agitators have come into the quiet villages to “upset the status quo.” Death threats have been made, the villagers say.

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Jose Tenerio, in his slouch hat and worn workclothes, is teaching three men and a small boy how to mix mortar for stone masonry. The stones are his textbooks. The lesson he is teaching seems to be: if you want a new school in your village then learn how to build it yourself. His pupils will graduate with honors if the roof they build does not fall in. “Our people have to help themselves,” says Alex Mercure, who directs the statewide Home Improvement Education Program—help —a self-help and self-education project for rural villages that guides the work at La Loma and fifty other villages. “If you want to help people, let them tell you what they need. Let them decide; never impose your needs on them. It won’t work.” “Farm workers have to tell you what they want,” Mercure says, “and they have to learn how to do that, whatever it is, by themselves.” Even as they work, they study. They work two hours for every hour they study, for studying is the harder labor to these farmers. They earn one dollar an hour for going to school—thirty dollars a week. They are men of the earth, practical men, and what they learn to do, they do. What good is education to them if it is not of use to them? “You can’t plant seeds with talk,” Mercure says. In the village of Antonchico “the students” have opened a coopera¬ tive store, where they practice what they have been taught, “lower PECOS VALLEY FARMERS-CONSUMERS COOP STORE INC.” SayS the sign on the old adobe. Inside are a few shelves of meager canned goods, sacks of flour, soda pop, and tobacco; by the screen door an archaic cash register; and at the roadside is an old-fashioned gas pump, circa 1930. The poorest of the villagers come to buy, and hesitantly join the Coop. It costs $15 a family. But everything sells for pennies less than elsewhere in the village; gas is five cents less per gallon. One farmer, in shabby overalls, comes in with his welfare check. He owes almost the whole amount to a merchant in town for last month’s groceries; but he pays his $ 15 to join the Coop, half a week’s subsis¬ tence, before going off to pay his debt. “I am always in debt,” he says. “Now maybe I can be free of debt?” The merchants are furious. “Socialistic” is their epithet. The Aber¬ crombie family, whose store has been the largest in the village for

The Stones of the Poor

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nearly a century, charges that the Coop is “destructive” of the “estab¬ lished businesses.” So does the Santa Rosa News, the “official paper” of the City of Santa Rosa, County of Guadalupe, New Mexico, that editorializes: “... it seems obvious that they [those who run the Coop] are dedicated to upsetting the status quo in Anton Chico, in the hope of getting what they call a better deal for the area’s poor people.” Federal antipoverty funds are being used to support this “disturbing new element” of “idealistic firebrand[s].” The editorial charges that the villagers had “every right” to run a Coop, but were they not taking “unfair advantage” by letting vista volunteers (who draw $7 weekly expense money from federal funds) watch the store “in direct compe¬ tition with local Anton Chico business?” “One night I think they will try to take our Coop and our school apart, stone by stone,” says Piacomo Ortega. Every village has its general store. In Antonchico it is “the Aber¬ crombie place.” The Abercrombies established their first mercantile store in the village. The four generations of the fartiily have since been the local benefactors and bankers, merchants and mercenaries, pa¬ triarchs and pariahs. The emporium of the family is a treasure house of dry goods and foodstuffs and hardware and farm equipment. Amid the transistor radios and saddles can be found all the needs of the farmers. The Abercrombies not only retail and wholesale the scenery, but help many a village family through the rough winter, with neigh¬ borly credit. Some say the merchants have helped the village survive. And some say it is the merchants who have kept the village poor. The small-town merchant family reigns like benevolent merchant princes. Patriarchs are hated, as well as envied. In ,the village they point with anger to the family ranch of five thousand acres where they live like country squires. Where did they get all that land, when we have none? they say. Inside the schoolhouse there are violent voices; the Abercrombies have come to investigate the curious doings of the farmers of La Loma. The merchants are members of the Board of Directors of the village’s War on Poverty agency, the Community Action Program. Led by David Abercrombie, they question, a bit nervously, what the farmers are up to:

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Merchant: I understand you have a crop program. For what purpose? Farmer: The purpose of this program is to teach this people a little more about farming. Merchant: If and when you have any produce from this crop program, how will it be disposed of? Farmer: The seed was bought by the people, so the produce goes to the people. And the produce will be sold, at a minimal price, for the benefit of the people. Merchant: To whom? Farmer: To the people. Merchant: Who’s selling it? Will these farmers sell it? Farmer: If we can farm something besides a little alfalfa we can make a little money. Listening to the voices, Piacomo Ortega and H. H. Mondragon grin at one another. “It is a tape recording,” Ortega says. “Last month we had that meeting, a fight. I said, ‘I like you all on tape so I can show your intention is to undermine any project we have for the poor.’ ” H. H. Mondragon says, “The merchants did not come because of our crops. But because of our Coop store. I was on our local Commu¬ nity Action Program board, and the merchants didn’t care what the poor did, at first. They got interested when we started the Coop. They wanted to keep things tight in the village. They are rich men who don’t need poverty programs. “They can’t eat the hay, but they won’t let the horse eat it,” he says. Saying the folk saying in Spanish—the villagers have a proverb for all occasions, but a Spanish proverb can be said only in Spanish—H. H. Mondragon translates his words reluctantly, saying, “Of course, this I cannot translate.” “Now we have two Community Action Program boards,” he says. “Theirs and ours.” In the gentler era of the old patron this dispute would never have happened. The welfare of the poor villagers, before there were any community action and county welfare programs, was the responsibil¬ ity of the village itself, of the patron. The most esteemed, often the wealthiest, and at times the wisest man in the village, the patron ruled neither by election nor by inheri¬ tance, but by the consensus of the villagers. He was counselor, godfa-

The Stones of the Poor

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45

ther, spokesman, and even priest to the villagers. He was “expected to be generous, hospitable, brave, courageous,” writes Dr. Clark Knowlton, director of the University of Utah’s Center for the Study of Social Problems, who lived for some years in northern New Mex¬ ico. “He settled disputes between families, provided employment, assisted the poor and helpless, called out the villagers for communal endeavors, arranged for care of the church—later the school—and sponsored village fiestas.” He was known as El Jefe, the Chief. The patron has been compared to a lord of feudal Spain. But in the villages of the Southwest the comparison is dubious. The patron was not the master of serfs, nor was his house a castle; it was more likely a simple adobe. Unlike the elegant dons of the haciendas of Old Mexico the village leader was not a great landowner; he had no awesome power of life and death. The old-timers talk of village life as a unity of communal Christian¬ ity and fierce individuality. Both of these tend to nullify the stereotype of the patron. He was more probably like an Aztec lord or Apache chief. In personal matters his power was that of a wise father, and in political matters his voice was that of a tribal chief, or leader of a familial band. Whatever power he held could be taken from him by the unspoken consensus of the villagers—as in an Indian tribe. Even his title had to be renewed by deeds, or he lost his position of respect. Later, the old-style patron was replaced by the jefe politico. His prestige has been traduced to that of a rural ward heeler, or local sheriff, for his power comes from outside the village; it was based on the political system of “the stranger.” The merchants have sought to become El Jefe. Most of them An¬ glos, some of them Texans, they have aggressively tried to assume the prestige and power of the patrons, if not their benevolence, not in the traditional manner, but through the commercial means they know best, by extending credit and becoming the English-speaking middle¬ men for the Hispano villagers. They are the commercial patrons. “The patron system has been acculturated,” says Alex Mercure. Nowadays the patron “works within the Anglo’s structure and the Anglo values. He buys loyalty,” aS Mercure puts it. “Like the tradi¬ tional patron his attitude toward people is one of condescension. He

46

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treats them that way, and they react that way.” In one village the merchants buy cedar posts from the farmer for

25

cents and sell them for one dollar. The villagers complain, but they feel obligated to sell to the merchant, for they are indebted to him, and fear to “insult” him, thereby incurring his anger. “Last summer we were without water,” says Piacomo Ortega, citing another incident. “For two days, three days, we were without water. The farmers petitioned the local Community Action Program for help. We had in mind a water tank. If we could get a loan we would erect it ourselves. I have a letter that says someone in the Community Action Program went and withdrew our application. He lost it. He was one of the merchants here.” One of the merchants of Antonchico responds, “We have enough money to buy a water tank, if the people want it.” He ignores the farmers’ plea for a loan to build their own community water tank, as though it is an insult to his fatherly concern. The righteous indignation of the commercial patron whose motives have been questioned is recorded in the compassionate outburst of Mr. Marquez, the Hispano owner of the second and smaller store in the village of Antonchico. “In answer to your question of what I have done for the poor: here’s a few of them,” Mr. Marquez begins. “They have been done with the political push I have in this part of the country. I worked to get this road paved to Antonchico. I worked to get that community associa¬ tion of the well. I worked to get Rural Electricity in here. I used my own pocket money. I wasn’t getting no per diem, no mileage. I talked to different political big shots in the state and I got that bridge in Antonchico. That I have done out of my own self. I haven’t collected a penny on it from nobody and made a penny on it. I had a lot of trouble.” Piacomo Ortega replies, with diplomatic politeness, “Thank you, Mr. Marquez. I am sure with the political push you have we can get a lot of things done.” “Lots of members of the Coop store owe me money,” Mr. Marquez goes on, the implied threat obvious. “I loan them money when they need it. I even loan a certain individual five hundred dollars, and I

The Stones of the Poor

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didn’t ask him to write a note or anything. He never paid me back a penny. Ninety per cent of your Coop owe me money. When they need groceries, when they were unemployed, when they didn’t have no money to feed their family, I feel sorry for them and I decided to help them,” the merchant says. “Mr. Marquez, I feel sorry for you,” replies Ortega. “I am sure these people would pay you if they could buy groceries a little cheaper.” “How can I sell cheap, and charge it, and not collect it?” says the merchant. “I am the cheapest store in the whole United States.” On the recording of the fight in the schoolhouse the voices grow shrill and the lines of the conflict sharply defined. Merchant: There’s a man here in Antonchico, he’s not too wealthy, or anything, I think he receives food stamps; well, he had his house burned down about six months ago. Did any of you people lift a hand to help him? Farmer: Did you? Merchant: Yes, I did. I gave him a little credit. Farmer: Who is that man you ’re talking about? Merchant: You know him. Farmer: I know him. Do you know what he makes with his animals? He is not considered poor.

The poor are jealous of their poverty. Among these farmers to be poor is no dishonor, it is a hard-earned misery. They do not trust those who profess their love of the poor, or who make their living from helping the poor, or the politicians of poverty. A stone, they say, that is what poverty is. It is a stone on the heart of a man to be poor. He who is poor must bear the burden with dignity. It is his sense of pride as much as, if not more than, the fears of the poor villager that has preserved the quiet of the countryside. The reticence of the Hispano was, in part, due to this inbred dignity. A political leader says of the villager, “He is proud—not humble.” H. H. Mondragon has a more sophisticated way of phrasing this paradox: “It is mostly the humbleness of the poor that lets them be tricked. But the poor can be tricky, too. They may be humble, but they are shrewd. They know how to protect themselves by expecting noth¬ ing. They are seldom disappointed.” Once the villagers of La Loma had begun to rebuild their own

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community, with their own hands and their own ideas, stone by stone, their pride grew to stubbornness. The attacks of the stranger bewil¬ dered them. “The people in the village try to do something to better themselves, and what happens? Everybody in power tries to stop them,” exclaims young Arthur Sandoval, who is a

vista

volunteer and clerk in the

Coop store. He is a likable young man, with serious eyes and a quiet, moody manner. “I always had food on my table when I was a boy. My family wasn’t poor,” he says, almost apologetically. “These people have nothing.” A young Chicano coming home to his village from the world of affluence brings with him the sense of dedication of a peni¬ tent. “He considers himself well paid in the intangible gains to the status and well-being of the people he has volunteered to serve—the poor people of his native New Mexico,” the Santa Rosa News com¬ ments. He is, says the newspaper, one of the “revolutionary” ones. “Revolutionary?” Sandoval says. “I spend most of my time selling cans of soup!” He says little among the village elders. In the meeting in the schoolhouse, with the merchants, the youth says not one word at first. “May I say something?” Sandoval begins in a small voice hardly audible on the tape. “I would just like to say, you, Mr. James Aber¬ crombie, are asking the

help

director what he’s done to help the poor

when right before your very eyes, your very eyes, there is a coopera¬ tive store that will help these people. You on the Community Action Board might be asked the same question: What have you done to help the poor? “I will tell you,” the young man goes on, his voice rising in pitch. “You haven’t done a damn thing!” “Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” James Abercrombie yells into the din that arises. He is stung by the youth’s insolence. He calms himself sufficiently to say solicitously, “Did you eat your meal today? At noon?” “I don’t have to ask you that,” Sandoval replies. He will not be hedged. “I can see you did.” Now there is uneasy laughter among the farmers. In the village no one insults an Abercrombie to his face so brazenly.

The Stones of the Poor

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“Do you know that what you eat somebody works for?” the mer¬ chant says coolly. He is talking of the government money that pays for the vista volunteers. “Do you know I also work for what I eat?” Sandoval is belligerent and petulant at once. The merchants turn from the youth in annoyance, as though he is a mosquito, and turn their questions to the village leader, Piacomo Ortega. Piacomo Ortega is more than the director of the Center of help. He is the rural Chicano, a man of sturdy build and toughness, whose boyish face hides his unexpectedly quick tongue. When he is crossed, he strikes back. He has that “Spanish temperament.” Under his mild manner there is that residue of anger common to the rural village leader. “Why don’t you help your people, instead of these coop stores to fight the established businesses?” David Abercrombie asks him. “You have a misunderstanding. We’re not trying to fight anybody,” Ortega says. “We’re trying to help the people. And if we can get them together, to unite, they can help themselves by helping one another.” “I think we’ve all done these things for our community,” the mer¬ chant says. “We’ve done everything we could to help the people of the community. Everything constructive, not destructive, as you are try¬ ing to do.” “Very well stated, David,” Ortega says with sarcasm. “Constructive —for yourself!” “For the community,” the merchant insists. “For yourself,” Ortega says. “You help these people for the money they pay you. You don’t help them because you’re such a good soul, David.” There is silence. There is nothing more to say. In the school of stones the young farmer and the wealthy merchant glare at each other. The social abyss that has been hidden under the calm surface of the village for generations of poverty has been exposed. It is ugly to see, the distrust, the hatred. The men are both disturbed and silenced by the sight. The stones of the poor have shifted the weight of power, ever so slightly. The village is divided, publicly.

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“I will tell you something,” says a farmer. “We are angry. If the men of Tierra Amarilla came here, with their rifles, I would follow them. And, I think, I would not be alone.” “When is Tijerina coming?” he asks.

IV

The Lion and the Cricket

On the grassy fields the sun is gentle. Police cars are parked by the roadside. The officers stand off to the side, in a tight group, their revolvers hung loosely at the hip, uneasy as cowboys inside a rodeo corral. Whenever a car passes on the highway their eyes follow it with suspicion to see if it will turn onto the country road. The officers are strangers in a strange land. The State Police have every reason to be wary. In one of these cars Reies Lopez Tijerina may be riding. Barely two months before, at a remote village crossroads not much different from this, four State Police cars were shot full of holes, two officers were wounded, and the county courthouse was invaded by an armed band of villagers said to be followers of Tijerina. They are out of the state penitentiary and heading this way. They say Tijerina is coming to speak at the schoolhouse in Antonchico. “He is coming,” they say in the village. “El Tigre,” the tiger, Tijerina. A small handbill has been surreptitiously passed about the village for days, read aloud in whispers, with disbelief, awe, curiosity, and mockery. The handbill reads:

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U.S.A. IS TRESPASSING IN NEW MEXICO U.S.A. HAS NO TITLE FOR NEW MEXICO THE TREATY OF GUADALUPE HIDALGO IS A FRAUD AND INVALID ESTADOS UNIDOS NO TIENE JURISDICCION EN N. MEX. ALL TRESPASSERS MUST GET OUT OF NEW MEXICO! NOW! ALL PIRATES GO HOME ALL SPANISH AND INDIAN PUEBLOS ARE FREE FOREVER ALL TRESPASSERS WILL BE PUNISHED BY LAW VIVAN LOS PUEBLOS REPUBLICAS LIBRES DE NUEVO MEX.

At the crossroads there is a church with a large cross of wood, chopped out of logs by a woodcutter’s ax. One old cow lies down in the middle of the road as the cars detour around her. A chicken is hit by a pickup truck. It seems to be just another Sunday. On Sundays there are always cars on the road. The families on the outlying farms come to Mass and stay to visit relatives. But this afternoon the cars and pickups of the farmers disappear as soon as they come into the village, leaving the street deserted. The Sheriff drives by. He circles the village and the one street, four, five, six times. He too is waiting for Tijerina. But the doors of the schoolhouse are locked. The janitor has disappeared with the keys and cannot be found. The meeting will not happen after all. A Hispano policeman walks up to the car of one of the village elders parked in the shadows. He extends his hand, palm upward, through the open window of the car. In his palm is the missing key. “I am with you, fellows,” the policeman says. He walks away. The village elder opens the schoolhouse doors. He is a very old man in a rumpled, unpressed suit and faded cravat, but his best for this important occasion, wearing a crucifix and a tie clip inset with a gaudy miniature of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The elder leads the way and a few younger men follow him. Most of the villagers wait to see if Tijerina will really come. “He is come,” someone says. “Where?” a man asks. “In the black car,” says the elder. The large, black car roars to a halt. A group of young men in business suits get out; these are the stalwarts of the Alianza—the Alianza Federal de Los Pueblos Libres—the Federal Alliance of Free

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City States. In the midst of them is a young man in his shirtsleeves, his dark hair flying, with a tense and preoccupied look. He is Reies Tijerina. Hundreds of villagers suddenly appear. They come in pickup trucks, cars, and farm trucks and on foot. In minutes the schoolyard is jammed by dozens of vehicles and hundreds, perhaps three hundred, villagers. An old man in a weary cowboy hat kisses Tijerina on both cheeks. They have never met before, for they say Tijerina has never been in this village. The elders of the village go forward to welcome their guest, but not a word is said. Ranchers and farmers are men of few words. They gather in a circle of silence about Tijerina. He embraces them, one by one. The younger men, who have waited stiffly and politely, shake his hand. It is a wordless ritual. When the welcome is done, Tijerina strides into the schoolhouse in what looks like a religious procession. The men walk after him, and the women after them, to the lunchroom, where the meeting will be held. Half of the village is crowded onto the benches, the tables, the window sills, the kitchen stoves, expectant, watching Tijerina, who sits facing them. It is not yet time to begin. The village women bring pots and caul¬ drons full of green chili and beans and hot dogs. Four homemade layer cakes elaborately decorated and iced, one covered with red hearts of sugar, are set out on the tables. A corrido must be sung. George Jaramillo is the village singer, a bull of a man who sings with much gusto. His is but one of the songs written for Tijerina; the popular band leader and vocalist Rudy Mar¬ tinez has recorded a ballad, “The Robin Hood of the North,” that is a hit song on the jukeboxes in cantinas throughout the Southwest. One of the best known of the corridos is that of Cleofas Vigil of San Cristobal, whose verses celebrate the advent of the “God-sent” Tijerina: Reies Lopez Tijerina blessed with courage they put him in jail but he showed no fear.

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He spoke for Justice with reason, and what he said to them, in truth, is the purest truth. Ay, Mexican Indian born of Spanish blood you begin to bestir and shed your humiliation. Reies Tijerina rises. There is no applause. He has said nothing and the farmers do not applaud for nothing. He begins with a parable: “We are like the cricket. The cricket is a very small insec t. It is said that one night the King of the Beasts, the great lion, heard the cricket yelling and making noise. The lion laughed at all the yelling the cricket was doing. “The lion said, ‘It is a shame to be King of the Insects. You have no power. Nothing to be proud of.’ He insulted the cricket’s pride. “The cricket challenged the lion to a fight to decide who was the strongest. And the King of the Beasts was ready to swallow the cricket in one bite. The cricket got into the lion’s ear. He tickled and he itched him. The lion started scratching with his claws, to get the cricket out of his ear. And he bled himself to death! And the cricket won the battle. “Humble people, weak people, small people, who are surrounded by empires, have no other resort but the wisdom and strategy of the cricket. “We are a very meek people. We don’t stand a chance against an empire. Though we are weak and small, the day is very close when this great giant, the United States, the King of the Beasts, with its eco¬ nomic strength, its political power, its ruling the world, with the claws of the lion, will either give in to the cricket, or bleed himself to death, by scratching his own ears. “The great lion can’t afford to do that, to bleed himself to death.” He says this softly. Reverend Tijerina—he was an evangelical preacher—talks from a podium as though it is a pulpit. In gentle tones he begins a sermon. Without warning his voice rises to a shrill cry:

The Lion and the Cricket

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“Justice is catching up with the United States. Justice is catching up with all the great empires that have suppressed the cultural rights and property rights of the small and weak people such as we, ourselves. The rich and the unjust are being swept away. The rich and the unjust have no place any longer, and they know it. It is why they are desper¬ ate against us, but history is against them. The poor and the humble will have their day under the sun. The poor and the humble will rule. Mankind will rule mankind. “It is never too late for justice. This is the time. The time is ripe. There is a time for everything under the sun. Solomon the Wise said that. Our time has come.” The whispers of the women stir for a moment, then subside. The men sit stunned and unsure. It is good talk, but it is easy to talk. He tells of the uprising of the farmers in the mountains to the north, in the village of Tierra Amarilla, where poor men, like themselves, decided they were ready “to fight, to go to jail, to die” to win back their land. “The Spanish people matured in those few days, they grew up,” he says. “We are more determined than ever to win back dignity, to preserve and revive our culture. We can never go back now. We will fight to the end. We will win back our land.” The land! This the men of the village do understand. He tells them of history through the land. In a booklet published by his Alianza it says: “For as long as the ownership of property is the basic foundation of our society, everyone has a vested interest in the protection of property. . . . Therefore, every person has a vested interest in seeing to it that not only his, but his neighbor’s, property is adequately protected, so that the thieves will not inherit the earth. ” Yet, the thieves, the Anglos, have stolen your land, Tijerina says. The men of the village lean forward, intent. He recites the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, signed by the United States after the war against Mexico. Article VIII of that rarely reprinted, little-remembered treaty states, “In the Name of Almighty God”:

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Mexicans now established in territories previously belonging to Mexico, and which remain for the future within the limits of the United States, as defined by the present treaty, shall be free to continue where they now reside, or to remove at any time to the Mexican Republic, retaining the property they possess in the said territories. . . . In the said territories, property of every kind, now belonging to Mexicans not established there, shall be inviolately respected. The present owners, the heirs of these, and all Mexicans who may hereafter acquire said property by contract, shall enjoy with respect to it guarantees equally ample as if the same belonged to citizens of the United States. He recites the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, going back to Chief Justice Marshall, reaffirming property rights guar¬ anteed by international treaty (US. v. Percheman): It may not be unworthy of remark, that it is very unusual, even in cases of conquest, for the conqueror to do more than to displace the sovereign and assume dominion over the country. The modern usage of nations which has become law would be violated; that sense of justice and of right which is acknowledged and felt by the whole civilized world would be outraged if private property should be generally confiscated and private rights an¬ nulled. The people change their allegiance; their relations to each other and their rights of property remain undisturbed. Our rights, says Tijerina, were held by the Supreme Court to be “consecrated by the law of nations,” for “the treaty stipulation was but a formal recognition of the pre-existing sanction of the law of nations”

(U.S. v. Moreno). He recites these texts from memory. When he talks he quotes dozens of documents from memory. He is a walking lawbook. Not often does he misplace more than a word. “We are people of little knowledge,” Tijerina says. “We remember our history, however.” He tells the villagers that he has visited the “United States Govern¬ ment in Washington” in pursuit of justice. “I have been to the State Department two times. I had an invitation from a lawyer in the Legal Section of the State Department. He objected to the treaty. He stated the treaty holds no water because the signature of Nicholas P. Trist,

The Lion and the Cricket

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who signed it for the United States, was not official, was no good, and there are records that Congress refused to ratify the treaty on those grounds. However, President James Polk persuaded Congress to ratify the treaty because of the coming elections. So they signed it the way it was. “Now, the way we stand with the State Department is—they refuse to recognize the treaty. They refuse to recognize the protocol. They claim the United States has ‘the right of conquest.’ “Our blood, our culture, our destiny, our property right depend on the treaty,” says Tijerina. “The treaty is binding on the United States, just as the Treaty of Guantanamo Bay with Cuba, just as the Treaty with Vietnam. It is a treaty!” In the Southwest, the lands ceded by Mexico to the United States, under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, range across Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and north into Wyoming. The vast lands constitute one-third of the nation, an area larger than that of any nation of Europe (except the Soviet Union) and greater than that of the majority of the nations of the world. Whether the property rights guaranteed by the treaty are held to be legally valid would appear to be no small real-estate matter. Of these lands much, if not most, belonged to land grants known to number at least 1,715, given by the Spanish and Mexican govern¬ ments to early settlers. Land grants in New Mexico alone may have covered half of the state. No one will ever know. The archives of Santa Fe were destroyed, burned, and sold for waste paper by order of the Territorial Governor, William A. Pike, from 1869 to 1871. Hardly one-fourth of the historic documents and land-grant records were ever recovered. Ten years later, in 1880, Adolph Bandelier, the Swiss trav¬ eler-writer, visited the ruins of the archives. They were in “horrible condition,” he wrote. General Lew Wallace, the then governor, told Bandelier that his predecessor in office had “thrown them [the ar¬ chives] into an outhouse to rot” amid the dung; but it was done “through ignorance,” the governor thought. The rector of St. Francis Cathedral in Santa Fe believed the truth more evil. Governor Pike had been a land speculator whose destruc¬ tion of the archives “was done on purpose to destroy Mexican claims”

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to the land, the Catholic priest said. Pike was, in fact, an owner of the Maxwell Land Grant and Railroad Company, together with the Sur¬ veyor General of New Mexico, T. Rush Spencer, and the cohorts of the “Santa Fe ring.” Curiously, at the time that the archives of Santa Fe were being stuffed into an outhouse, the archives of Guadalajara in Mexico were damaged by fire, an intriguing coincidence. Encouraged by their fellow conspirators of fire and feces, the “Santa Fe ring” fleeced the Hispano sheepherders of their lands. The “ring” leaders, Thomas B. Catron and Stephen B. Elkin, were lawyers so ingenious that within a few years “over 80 percent of the Spanish and Mexican grants were lost to their owners” {ThePublic Domain in New Mexico by Victor Westphall, past president of the Historical Society of New Mexico). One “ring” leader acquired pieces of seventy-five land grants, owned 2 million acres outright, and was part owner, or lawyer, for 4 million more acres. The Maxwell Land Grant, one of the “ring’s” prizes, ranged over entire mountains and whole villages for 1,714,764 acres. Although this empire was the private property of half a dozen men, it had cost them but a few dollars. They did not buy it; they simply “patented” it in their own names, with the approval of the U.S. Government’s Land Office. “He who steals a million is a financier,” wrote the Rio Abajo Weekly

Press of Albuquerque, in 1863. “He who steals half a million is only a defaulter. He who steals a quarter of a million is a swindler. He who steals fifty thousand is a knave. But he who steals a pair of boots or a loaf of bread is a scoundrel and deserves hanging.” The land seemed to be for the taking. After all, the villagers did not occupy much of their land grants, the forests were ejidos, the common pastures, and the villages were far away in small, neighborly valleys. Most of the land was uninhabited, by the definitions of Anglo-Saxon law. It was simple to claim the land by merely filing a “patent,” or deed. In this way the lands were lost. A Catholic Sister of Charity who lived in New Mexico at this time described one method of legal land theft. Sister Blandina Segale, in her At the End of the Santa Fe Trail, wrote:

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In the early days of Anglo settlement in New Mexico the unsuspicious and naive Spanish Americans were victimized on every hand. When the men from the states came out west to dispossess the poor natives from their lands, they used many subterfuges. One was to offer the owner of the land a handful of silver coins for the small service of making a mark on a paper. The mark was a cross which was acceptable as a signature by which the unsuspecting natives deeded away their lands. By this means, many a poor family was robbed of all their possessions.

In the village of Villanueva the farmers told Dr. Clark Knowlton (“Land Grant Problems Among the State’s Spanish-Americans,” in New Mexico Business, a publication of the School of Business Ad¬ ministration, University of New Mexico) of still another “typical” method of land theft: Several Anglo-American lawyers living in Las Vegas cast their eyes upon a large community land grant rich in grazing lands. A lawsuit was brought against the village, challenging its land title. The panic-stricken villagers employed lawyers to defend their claims. The lawyers agreed to take the case provided they were paid in land.... After several years of court action, the village won. The defending lawyers had taken as their fee the best grazing land from the village ejido and divided the land with the challenging attorneys.

The farmers did not understand this business of written deeds and lawyers’ fees. Not because they were simple-minded, but because their philosophy of land ownership was too complex and ancient. In a sense the Hispano villagers thought of the land as did their Indian ancestors. Were not the fields a blessing of the Almighty God for which all men had a common moral obligation unto Him? Land was a parcel of eternity; it could not be reduced to the size of a piece of paper. “One thing that is not commonly understood or known is that the philosophy of Anglo-American law [of the land] is very different from New Mexico’s Spanish philosophy of law,” says Father Robert Garcia, a former village priest. “Anglo-American law is legalistic, highly technical, aggressive. The law that they (the New Mexican villagers) were used to was humanistic and based on tradition, defacto ownership, and a consideration for the right of every individual to own property and earn a living. Much consideration was given to the good of the family, inheritance, and the good of the community. The failure

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of the people to understand a new system of laws imposed on them by the Anglo-Americans has caused the collapse of their rural economy.” The profits on these land grabs were as large as the land grants. Catron, “The King of the Santa Fe ring,” in a state of euphoria had legalized the expected return on land sales when he personally wrote a law that approved interest on bank loans in New Mexico of up to 20 per cent a month, or 240 per cent a year. His license for usury was passed without debate by the Territorial Legislature. “He left his scars, this man, on each one of the land grants,” Tijerina says of Catron. Not until 1891 was a Court of Private Land Claims established to deal with the conflicts over the land. Thought of as the belated offer of justice to the poor villagers, the court rulings justified the theft of their lands. Land grants of 34,653,340 acres were brought to the court, often by village men who traveled for days and weeks by wagon and horseback, but the Court of Private Land Claims validated title to only 1,934,986 acres, and denied the rest. Ninety-four per cent of the claims of the villagers were dismissed. Tijerina tells the villagers that the courts were “death traps” for the poor. There were no Mexican judges in this court. There were no Mexican lawyers. “We can detect ill will,” Tijerina says of the court. “By refusing us judicial protection; by the governor destroying our titles, and then the court denying justice, there were ill intentions on the part of the United States.” In Texas the Spanish and Mexican land grants may have covered 20 million acres or more. No one knows, or will ever know. Here, too, the archives of the Land Office were reportedly “badly damaged dur¬ ing the difficulties under Joaquin deArredonde in 1813.” These land grants prior to 1813 that were destroyed, unfortunately, belonged almost exclusively to Mexicans. But those given to Texans by the Mexican Government in the 1820’s and 1830’s to entice settlers were not damaged by natural catastrophe. Unsatisfied by their good for¬ tune, the Anglo land speculators and cattle ranchers persuaded the Texas State Legislature to insert an article in the Constitution of 1876

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—Article XIII, Section 4—that decreed that all Spanish and Mexican land grants not duly recorded by that year were invalid. The Texas Supreme Court ruled Section 4 was unconstitutional, but even this has not ended the dispute over the ashes of the lost land grants. “The end is not in sight,” one authority on the Texas land fights reports. In the barrios and colonias of Southwest Texas, Tijerina’s Alianza is recruiting the heirs to the land grants. “We will get our land back,” says the scion of an old family in San Antonio; he is a conservative leader of the community. “One day this will be the country of Mexicans again,” he says. “We have the legal right to the land and soon we will have the political power to enforce the law of the land. We will then get back our stolen land.” Up in the San Luis Valley of Colorado, the fight for the land grants has been violent. In the late 1950’s, long before the advent of the Alianza, the cowboys of the cattlemen and the Hispano farmers en¬ gaged in a gunfight over the grazing rights on the mountain pastures near Alamosa. The land-grant heirs said it was their common pasture. Several cowboys were shot and beaten. The gunfight flared into the headlines of the local newspapers, but then died away as the courts wondered aloud about what jurisdiction they had over land grants issued by the Court of Queen Isabella. The fight is quieter in Arizona. Long before the coming of the Americans, the warring Apaches had driven the original land-grant owners out of the deserts. Land grants in California, however, may have come to tens of millions of acres. How many acres is again unknown. The lands have never been accurately surveyed; the results could lead to embarrass¬ ment for ranchers in the valleys and real-estate men along the free¬ ways. Under the Spanish rule the lands were sparsely settled, mostly on the coastal plain. The missions were few, after almost three hundred years of colonizing. There were but twenty ranchos in all of California. In 1821 the independence of Mexico changed all that. From 1821 to 1846 at least 630 land grants for private ranchos were given by the Mexican governors. When the war against Mexico began, in 1846, most of the fertile land up to the Sacramento Valley was owned by

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Mexican land grantees in ranches of from 4,500 acres to well over 100,000 acres. In 1851 the new State of California decreed that land-grant titles had to be approved by its courts. “This measure resulted in heavy court expenses drawn out over a period of years and ultimately de¬ prived the Mexican people of some of their aristocracy, as well as their lands,” the California Almanac records. “This measure, as it was carried into effect, clearly violated the spirit of the Treaty of Guada¬ lupe Hidalgo which guaranteed the conquered Mexicans the owner¬ ship of their lands and ranchos.” Whenever Tijerina talks in a village, he tells something of this history. He may talk for one hour, two hours, three hours. It depends on where he is, what village, how angry the village is, and whether this talk is welcomed with silence, or “Vivas. ” In the village of Antonchico the talk goes on all afternoon. The yells of “Vival” that applaud grow louder and more frequent. He tells the villagers that the thieves have inherited their land: “All in all, we feel there was an organized plan not only to destroy our culture, but our property rights. We have proofs, documents, petitions, writings with dates. The lands taken away from us belong not to individuals. They belong to the pueblos, the villages. Just like the Pueblo Indians. The United States respected the Pueblo Indians, but he has denied us. Why? “These land grants are not dead. These lands belong to the pueblos and the pueblos are alive. These pueblos have never been legally dissolved; therefore, we ask our government to recognize these pueb¬ los and return our lands, so that we can make our living out of the land, the water, the forests, the minerals, as The Almighty God intended. So that we can live.” If they will fight for their land, he tells the villagers, they will have to join together, to join with their neighbors, to join his Alianza. “We represent the dreams, the reality of the dreams of the Spanish Americans,” he says. “We represent the inner feeling and cry of the Spanish Americans. We represent the faith of the Spanish Americans. We represent the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. We represent the culture of the New Breed. We represent the future, the spirit of the future.”

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The skeptics have speculated that the land-grant movement has anywhere “from 300 to 30,000 followers,” the New York Times has reported. When the New Mexico State Police seized the membership lists of the Alianza the newspapers reported that 13,000 names or more were in the card indexes. The idea of “card-carrying” heirs to ancestral lands brings smiles to the villagers. In the villages an heir needs no membership card in his history. That would be meaningless. Rituals of organization do exist, and they are religiously adhered to, but the itemized and computerized method of evaluating political strength that is normal to the nameless voters in the cities is unnecessary, and absurd, in the rural villages. Everyone knows his neighbor’s politics, intimately. He remembers the beliefs of his great-grandmother just as well. “We don’t need membership lists,” explains an old village leader. “We don’t need elections.” The villages are organized by history, in unseen ways. By old family groups, blood and compadre ties, the ancient lineage of marriage and heirship claims, and the secret societies of church and politics that outsiders rarely see, there is an elaborate hierarchy of power. Yet it exists beneath the surface. In every village there is either a Brother¬ hood of Penitentes, or an Order of the White Gloves, or the White Caps, or a Red Horseman posse of night riders in one southern moun¬ tain town, or the renowned Mano Negra—the Black Hand. Reies Tijerina and his Alianza did not organize these villagers. He merely reflects the generations of hidden and complex organization that has always existed. When “the Prophet” comes to a village no organizer has to go ahead of him as an advance man. The villagers decide on their own, in their own way, whether or not to listen to their “spokesman.” He is chosen not by vote, but by an unspoken consen¬ sus. The Prophet is an unelected leader. He may be deposed at will if he betrays the faith, or violates the beliefs of the villagers. When such a leader is rejected no one may tell him. He learns of the decision when his faithful followers turn away. He is laughed at and he is abandoned. In the village of Antonchico when Tijerina talks that afternoon there are times when no one seems to be listening. The old men gossip in whispers. Children run about. A young mother nurses her infant. He is telling the villagers what they already believe, so they hear him

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with half an ear, and nod occasionally in approval to reassure him. He is simply the catalyst between the villagers and the world, the voice of their silence. He does not make a speech; he enacts the history of the village. He performs all the roles in the historical pageant he recites. He is the lawyer, judge, victim, preacher, sufferer, farmer, oracle, avenger, and holy prophet. When he performs the ritual that everyone knows by heart he embodies all the voices, in falsetto, in basso, in sotto voce, in heroics, in anguish, in English, in Spanish; for he suffers the history of La Raza for everyone in the audience, as they have always told it themselves. The style is more than the man. His being is the organizing tool of the Alianza. No one hands out membership cards, no committees and subcommittees are formed, no dues are collected, there is no table for printed propaganda, and nothing is said publicly that has not been whispered privately for generations. But a prophet cannot stick to an old script. Suddenly the voice of Tijerina has brought the conflict of the twentieth century into the village. He jars the audience awake. “We cannot get our land back just by being nice and polite. We have to demand it. We have to fight for it,” Tijerina exhorts the villagers. “We have to be willing to die for it, like those patriots, George Wash¬ ington and Benito Juarez.” “Look at the black man,” he says. “He has become free, free in spirit. He has lost his fear of the ‘white power.’ He is clean of fear and terror. And when you become free of these things you become filled with anger. You strike out for freedom. Anger is a manifestation that you know you are right and you wish to tear down the system that enslaved you.” He offers not hope, but anger. The villagers, at first, are stunned, then enthralled. “Viva Tijerina!” they yell. The hot dogs and green chili and cakes with the little red hearts are served. In the schoolhouse lunchroom there is an air of celebration. One by one the villagers shake Tijerina’s hand. The old men embrace him, again. He is offered a slice of the cake. It is late afternoon when the meeting ends. The white sun is turning

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yellow. Soon it will be orange and red. On the road that leads into the village from the highway the state policemen wait, yawning and sweaty from the relentless hours in the sunlight. Evening comes to the quiet village. Nothing has changed.

V

The Fall of the Bastille of Yellow Earth

When the men put their rifles and pistols in the back seats of their cars that morning it looked like a storm was brewing. The sky was uneasy. In the mountains rain was threatening that Monday, June 5, 1967. But by the time they drove into the village the sun was shining. They thought it an omen. They entered the court¬ house, pointing their guns. They had come to make a “citizen’s arrest” of the District Attorney, they said, but they captured the Rio Arriba County seat instead, in a wild-West gunfight. They were headlines across the nation by daybreak.

“armed men shoot up court in land claim,” one newspaper wrote, “shoot out at tierra amarilla,” proclaimed another. The headline in the New Yprk Daily News was more prosaic: land grabbing mob GUNS DOWN 2 COPS

No one had heard of them before. Until that day the village of Tierra Amarilla—Yellow Earth—was hidden in a green valley, behind the mountains where the anger of the villagers had been asleep for genera¬ tions. In these mountains there are forests where the wilder beasts outnumber the humans. There is only one paved road.

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Where the road turns into the village there is an “Official State Historical Marker” that reads: TIERRA AMARILLA Founded 1858 POP. 1,246

ELEV. 7,460

THE TIERRA AMARILLA LAND GRANT COMPRISING ALMOST

600,000

ACRES WAS GIVEN TO JOSE MANUEL MARTINEZ BY THE MEXICAN GOVERNMENT IN

1832.

MANY DESCENDANTS OF JOSE MANUEL

MARTINEZ STILL LIVE IN THE AREA.

One man took it all away. The hundreds of thousands of acres of the land grant of Tierra Arnarilla were taken from the villagers in the 1880’s by the shrewd lawyer and land speculator Thomas B. Catron. He acquired the land merely by “patenting” it in his name at the Land Office and bribing a few officials. He became the owner of 593,000 acres with a single piece of paper. “We were naive,” an aged farmer sighs in a bar in Tierra Arnarilla. “Our grandfathers did not know anything about deeds, but only about the soil they held in their hands.” The villagers were landless. Yet they knew the land was theirs. It had always been their home. It was nonsense, surely, for a stranger to wave a piece of paper in their faces and say, The land is mine! He could not plow with his piece of paper. Then the cowboys came and put up barbed-wire fences. At first the villagers did not believe the stranger, but they believed the barbed wire. And then the little villages were stripped of their governments as easily as they had been stripped of their lands. In those days every village had its Mayor and Common Council— its Alcalde and Ayuntamiento—that governed the land grants. Some of these elected bodies were as old as the New England town meet¬ ings; some were older. The Territorial Government of New Mexico, in 1882, ordered these ancient village governments dissolved by issu¬ ing a decree. Recently lawyers for the villagers have questioned whether a federal official had the constitutional right to abolish an elected local government. But in 1882 there were no lawyers in the villages to question anything.

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The village of Tierra Amarilla was legally abolished. It was ordered to “incorporate” under a new law, but as in many villages the order was ignored for years. The people thought, We have our own govern¬ ment. So why do we need another. In the meantime the strangers from the East “incorporated” new villages in the place of the old ones. Las Vegas, a stubborn mountain town that is north of Santa Fe, has been divided ever since the decree of 1882 into two governments, two city halls, two mayors, two city councils, two police and fire depart¬ ments. One is Hispano and one is Anglo. The villages that were divided in this way were separated by what the Santa Fe New Mexican has called a “tortilla curtain.” The lament of Dr. Sabine Ulibarri of the University of New Mexico is perhaps more acute: “A dynamic and aggressive Anglo culture has come between the Hispano and his past.” Without land and without political power the villages began to die. The zest and vitality of rural life atrophied. The gregarious and boisterous Hispano villagers with¬ drew into the shadows of neglect, suspicion, poverty, and resentment. The deserted villages became backwaters of history. So the stage was set for the dramatic raid of the armed and angry farmers on the courthouse of Rio Arriba County, and the fall of the bastille of Tierra Amarilla. Once it was a beautiful village. In the bower of the mountains Tierra Amarilla was the county seat of Rio Arriba. It boasted the most imposing courthouse in northern New Mexico, an attempt at rural Greek Revival that succeeded in looking like a too-large mausoleum, and was therefore all the more imposing. The stores on its Main Street were garish and too large for a small village; the houses resembled small hotels, elaborate and rambling wooden buildings of Western baroque, with porticos ancl columns embroidered by Spanish wood¬ work. The courthouse is today a rural slum. Its paint is peeling and refuse heaps surround it. The fine houses tilt and sag. The great columns of the porticos are askew. The old stores are boarded up. On one of the abandoned stores there remains a sign, “this is the place,” but underneath is the inevitable litany of architectural decay, “fuck you! fuck you! fuck you!” The village is surrounded by National Forests

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and has not enough pasture for its sheep and cattle. Its people are hungry. Rio Arriba County is a “hunger county,” one of the poorest in the Southwest. Of the 23,000 residents there are 11,000 on welfare. In Tierra Amarilla the conditions are so poor they say it is a “ghost town.” There are 600 villagers left of the 2,200 who lived there in its days of splendor. “Some of us are pretty desperate,” a farmer in Tierra Amarilla wrote to the Albuquerque Journal in July, 1964. “We have tried to be good citizens, and our reward has been no justice in the courts and pow¬ dered milk from the Welfare. We don’t want Welfare, we want enough of our land to graze a milk cow.” The life of the ghost town is volatile. It goes on underneath the faded facades and repressed history. The villagers have become muted, irritable, cynical, and self-destructive. When they get drunk they explode with hatreds. “They are not violent by nature. They are very patient,” said Governor Cargo. “They are a people that is quiet and reserved.” But the angers within them eat at them like their hungers. When Reies Tijerina first came to Tierra Amarilla he was met with suspicion. He told the hesitant villagers about the Alianza—the Alli¬ ance of Free City States—which he had founded to regain the Spanish and Mexican land grants. It was time, he told them, to reclaim their lost land and to re-establish their village government. They listened with one ear. He told them of his prophecy of the “New Breed,” who would inherit the earth of their ancestors; “Justice shall reappear on earth, like Christ,” he told them. / One by one the villagers shook Tijerina’s hand. They did not wholly trust the prophetic stranger—he was an “outsider”—but if they did not do something they would have nothing. And their children would starve or run away. The villagers went on a pilgrimage to see the then Governor Jack Campbell in the summer of 1966, bearing petitions that politely, with formality, asked for an investigation of their land claims. Marching on the superhighway from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, for sixty miles, they chanted, “We want justice, not powdered milk!” It was a peaceful

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march. Led by the stranger, Reies Tijerina, they had come reluctantly. His beautiful daughter, Rosa, rode before them on a white horse; it was a splendid sight to see. On the outskirts of the state capitol they camped in a field, one hundred tired marchers. At last word came that the Governor would hear them. He praised the villagers for “exercis¬ ing a basic American right in such an orderly democratic fashion” and he promised to read their petition, and give it to the President of the United States. “Incidentally,” wrote the Albuquerque Journal, in 1966, they have “a good moral case. They say their march has stirred up much support all across New Mexico. We can see how that might be true. We would imagine it is also stirring some consternation among present land owners. And it will be interesting to see what comes of it.” Nothing came of it. “We do not demand anything,” Tijerina told the Governor at that time. “We just want a full investigation.” There was no investigation. “We have written to the Presidents—Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson—and to the State Department, all with no suc¬ cess,” Tijerina recalled in frustration. A bold deed was decided upon. El Grito del Norte (The Cry of the North), the newspaper of the mountain villagers, reported, “The Alianza looked for a way to ... bring before the courts this entire land issue, and force the U.S. Government to prove its right to the land.” Several hundred villagers gathered that October at the Echo Am¬ phitheatre, in the Carson National Forest, for a camp-out, or rather a camp-in; for “a picnic.” The site was the old San Joaquin del Rio de Chama Land Grant, of some 600,000 acres. In the midst of their picnicking they “liberated” the forest, “In the name of God Al¬ mighty” and the “Peoples’ Republic of San Joaquin.” They “arrested” two forest rangers for “trespassing” and in an impromptu “court,” in the picnic area, found them guilty and “confiscated” their jeeps. “As they confiscate our cows,” a villager said. Bemused by the “trial” of the two rangers, a state police officer, Martin Vigil, asked, “Why are you doing this?” From the picnic table, where he had climbed to watch, Tijerina shouted, “Publicity!”

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There was only laughter. “King Tijerina,” the newspapers mocked. He was dubbed a “jet age Pancho Villa” and a “Mexican Elmer Gantry” and a “would-be Castro” and a “disgrace to New Mexico.” Few people took the villagers, or Tijerina, seriously. Voicing the atti¬ tude of those beset by the more troublesome affairs of state was the offhanded comment of New Mexico’s Attorney General Boston Witt, “We considered Tijerina merely a rabble-rouser.” He was an afterdinner joke. “Nobody is listening,” the newly elected Governor Cargo later said. “They’ve got problems and nobody is listening. No one has time to listen.” “The Governor will hear us, we thought,” Tijerina said. He led the villagers once more to the state capitol. It is said that the young Governor is something of a maverick, a liberal Republican in austere Goldwater country; he has a degree in literature as well as law. Inde¬ pendent and unorthodox he has married into an old Hispano family. The Governor’s lady is a member of the Alianza 6f Reies Tijerina. “So with open heart we went,” the land-grant leader said. On the morning of the audience two hundred villagers came to the Governor’s office. The Governor was out. The no longer reluctant villagers, whose angers have become public knowledge, held a protest meeting in the middle of the great marble lobby of the new palacia of the Governor. “I never speak in public,” a woman said. Her demurring was in proper deference to the Hispano men. “But, after all, this building and the land it was built on belong to us, too. The Negro people show their anger. The whole world listens. Are our grievances not worthy to be heard?” “Let’s enter his office by force,” the woman shouted. “He’ll have to listen.” In the Land of Poco Tiempo of not so long ago such words would not have been spoken by a woman, or a man. At the Governor’s arrival, five hours late, he was apologetic. “We are not able to swallow, to tolerate, discriminatory procedures any more,” Tijerina told the Governor.

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“Violence never gets you anywhere,” the Governor said. “Yes? What about Vietnam?” said Tijerina. The Governor’s offer to appoint a commission, “in the near future,” to investigate the land grants did little to soothe the frustrations of the villagers. “We have held back our hands for a hundred and eighteen years, and where did it get us?” the woman had said. In the courthouse of Tierra Amarilla the villagers gathered again in May, 1967. Most of the village was there, almost five hundred men and women. They had come to hear Tijerina talk of yet another conference, in early June, to be held in the nearby village of Coyote, where the Alianza would plan a statewide campaign, and of course have a barbecue. But the villagers were tired of talk. Then and there, in the old courthouse, they voted to re-establish the Pueblo Republica de San Joaquin that had been dissolved by the decree of 1882. An alcalde (mayor) was elected. The military chief, the ancient title from the days of the Kingdom of New Mexico, was then chosen, along with a sheriff and the town council. They proclaimed the Free City-State of Tierra Amarilla. If the little village had declared war against the state of New Mexico the incredu¬ lous officials in the capitol would not have been more shocked. Had the villagers gone mad? One by one the old land-grant villages might re-establish free city-states, as Tierra Amarilla had done, and a peace¬ ful revolution would sweep through the mountains. And what of the land? Who knows what these village alcaldes might decree, or do, to restore the land grants? In Santa Fe the rumors spread. The men of Tijerina were ready for a “showdown,” one newspaper warned; it would begin with a “take¬ over” of the National Forests. Roadblocks manned by rifle-toting farmers were envisioned. And the summer tourist season was just beginning! State police were ordered to Coyote to halt the barbecue and meet¬ ing of the Alianza Federal. The District Attorney of Sante Fe County, Alfonso Sanchez, issued the orders, it was reported. Governor David Cargo was out of the state. “I didn’t order any arrests be made. I had nothing to do with it,” he later said. Sanchez was, however, a “special

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enemy of the Alianza,” declared El Grito del Norte. He had been a lawyer for some of the land-grant claimants before becoming District Attorney; his former clients said he had advised them to cut the National Forest fences and simply graze their cows. He perhaps re¬ gretted these indiscretions of his youth and now condemned the angry farmers as “a bunch of Commies.” “I wish the public did not think that all of us are like him, ” Sanchez said of Tijerina. “Already the public has the wrong image of our people.” The barbecue of Coyote was never held. On Friday, June 2, the posses of State Police and local sherilFs deputies surrounded the mountain village and the ranch where the farmers had gathered with their children, and rounded up the picnicking guerrillas. Eleven men were arrested. On that quiet day “ten Spanish Americans were arrested, probably illegally, for unlawful assembly,” the New York Times observed. “There had been no violence.” James Thompson, Who was to replace Alfonso Sanchez as District Attorney, later declared, “The raid [on the courthouse] was frustration precipitated by the action there at coyote ... the action [of the police] was apparently mishandled.” Under the mountain skies the frightened picnickers fled to the vil¬ lage of Canjilon, where they camped in a sheep pasture. On Monday morning, June 5, the Mayor of the Pueblo Republica de San Joaquin, and the Free City-State of Tierra Amarilla, issued orders for a citizen’s arrest of District Attorney Sanchez. Those who had been arrested for “unlawful assembly” were to be arraigned at the courthouse that morning. / The posse of twenty armed Hispano farmers, ranchers, and loggers was deputized by the Vigilance Department of the Pueblo Republica de San Joaquin. It was quiet in Tierra Amarilla that day, as usual. A flock of sheep grazed on the weeds behind the courthouse. The old man who walked down the middle of Main Street did not look up, for there was no traffic. The Valley Movie Theatre, a dilapidated building with barnlike wooden doors, was playing the usual Mexican melodrama, such as La Amor, La Gloria y el Muerte:

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LOVE, GLORY AND DEATH!

In the shabby blue and muddy courthouse were not only the offices of the sheriff and the state police, but also, in its dirt-floored cellar, the County Jail, and up a flight of worn, splintered stairs, the Department of Welfare. These were the pillars of power in the village—the court, the police, the jail, and the welfare office. The men approached the courthouse with ancient fears. To them it was the village Bastille. Sheriff Benny Naranjo dismisses the courthouse as “obsolete.” In the dank cellar the earthen floor of the jail is strewn with debris, the iron bars on its windows are rusted and ripped off, and the odor of urine is like that of a cesspool. “The jail’s not fit to keep animals in, let alone humans,” the Sheriff has said. “The jail would be condemned, except there is no other place to keep prisoners.” Men of the village who had been imprisoned in the jail have said it was “like being buried.” It was fear of this, too, that made the villagers come armed on that day. Reies Tijerina has said, “These people whose rights have been abused see the courts only as death traps. Innocent people become pale, weak, their joints freeze [in court]. That is the spirit that has developed over a hundred and twenty years, when people have lost all their money and their homes.” On the bulletin board of the courthouse were signs of these fears, but mostly there were notices of village boredom: WANTED—HAY HAULED HAY HAULER WITH TRUCK CALL—LOUIE ARCHULETA %

And urgent pleas from the government offices: NEW MEXICO STATE GOVERNMENT NEEDS YOU.1

The New Mexico Department of Welfare urgently needs case workers

And one ominous note:

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NOTICE OF INTENTION TO IMPOUND TRESPASSING LIVESTOCK

Notice is hereby given that all livestock found trespassing upon lands owned or controlled by the United States within the LabatoCH Allotment, El Rito Ranger District, Carson National Forest, State of New Mexico, will be impounded by the United States Forest Service . . . After impounding owners of trespassing livestock may regain possession thereof only by first reimbursing the United States in full for the expense incurred in gathering, impounding, feeding, or pasturing said livestock and for the forage consumed during the period of said trespass. All impounded animals not redeemed within 5 days after impounding will be offered for sale at public auction. Animals not sold at public sale will be sold at private sale or condemned and destroyed, as required by the regulations of the Secretary of Agriculture. Signed at El Rito, New Mexico This 17th of February, 1967 Jack P. Miller, Acting Forest Supervisor

The impounding notice is beside a poster of the “TA Community Action Program” that proclaims in bold letters: GET TOGETHER SPEAK OUT! COMMUNITY ACTION IS YOU WORKING TOGETHER TO SAVE YOURSELF

When the gunfight in the courthouse began that afternoon they say a bullet ricocheted off the wall beside that exhortation “community is YOU.” In his dismal office in the old courthouse Benny „Naranjo leaned back in his chair and dozed that afternoon. The state policeman, Nick Saiz, lounged in the lobby by the peanut-vending machine. Judge Scarborough had just freed the jailed men of the barbecue on bail. It action

was three o’clock by the courthouse clock. At that moment the villagers burst into the dreary building. The gunfight erupted at once. The state policeman, Saiz, was told to drop his gun. He reached for it, he says, and was shot in the chest. A man who was there, Fabian Duran, later swore that the state policeman drew his gun first. Judge Scarborough locked himself in the toilet of

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the Judge’s chambers. Some of the court employees escaped through the windows. One who jumped was Deputy Sheriff Elogio Salazar. He was shot twice before he reached the earth. Later, that winter, Elogio Salazar was found murdered in his blood¬ stained car on a lonely mountain road. He had been beaten to death by unknown assassins. In spite of the noisy gunfire at the courthouse only two men were wounded. The villagers held the building and searched the corridors but could not find Alfonso Sanchez, the man they had come to arrest. The District Attorney was not there. The Mexican American, a staff report prepared for the United States

Commission on Civil Rights in 1968, had this to say about the raid on the courthouse of Tierra Amarilla: Recent cases in Northern New Mexico have aroused particularly wide¬ spread resentment among Mexican Americans throughout the Southwest. In June of 1967, an organization formed to press Mexican American claims to ancestral and land grants, had scheduled a rally to be held in the country¬ side. The district attorney of Rio Arriba County [sic] warned leaders that the meeting would not be tolerated; as Mexican Americans arrived he arrested them on a variety of minor charges, including mistreatment of animals, and held them incommunicado for several days before dismissing the charges. In reprisal, a group of Mexican Americans attempted a citizen’s arrest of the district attorney at the Rio Arriba County Courthouse in Tierra Amarilla. In the ensuing melee the attackers wounded two officers. Follow¬ ing this episode, 50 Mexican Americans, including women and children, were held in an open sheep pen for 36 hours, with no charges against them, then or later.

At dusk the villagers escaped to the high mountains, led by Tijerina himself. He was later to swear that he came to the shoot-out at the courthouse after the gunfighting had started in order to halt it. But State Policeman Saiz is equally adamant that he saw the land-grant leader with “a rifle strapped to his arm [that] looked like an AR-15.” The county clerk, Cipriano Padilla, thought it was a “Thompson ma¬ chine gun.” The orders for the arrest of the villagers and land-grant leader were prompt. The charges: twenty-four counts of kidnaping, three counts of assault with intent to kill, and one count of attacking a courthouse.

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Reies Tijerina was himself later to be charged with fifty-four criminal acts because of the incident! Led by an M-42 tank destroyer a small army of National Guards¬ men, under the command of General Jacob Jolly, Adjutant General of New Mexico, invaded Tierra Amarilla. The soldiers, numbering 350, were joined by 80 members of the New Mexico Mounted Patrol, dozens of state policemen, sheriffs and their deputies from all the northern counties, and the officers of the New Mexico Game and Fish Commission. In all an armed force of more than 2,000 lawmen. The roads were barricaded. Jeeps crisscrossed the mountain passes with machine-gun units, but the raiders had escaped. In Canjilon, where the families awaited the return of their menfolk, the M-42 tank destroyer blocked the road. The old men, women, and children left in the camp were surrounded by soldiers who herded them into a muddy sheep pen and imprisoned them overnight in the barbed-wire enclosure. “They’re bait,” a National Guardsman said. “The brass expects that Mexican cat will come back in here tonight to try to free these peo¬ ple.” “Let’s don’t get involved in civil liberties,” General Jolly told the New York Times.

“In these high mountains no one could ever find us,” said a villager. “We know these mountains. They could never find us. No, they could not find Reies, he gave himself to them. The army would never find him. All the National Guard could not find Tijerina and twenty men. “Here in these mountains they would never find anyone,” he said. “What would happen if a Castro came into these mountains?” After the arrests of the “Robin Hood of New Mexico” and his Alianza men, and after the trials had begun, the villagers listened to the news reports with sullen anger. The state police complained, “No one will talk. They are afraid.” But in the villages it was not fear that silenced the farmers. “You mark my word. They better not hurt that man,” said a village leader. “If they hurt that man there will not be enough guards to protect someone in high places. I do not say who!” The trial of the land-grant leader and his followers was to be held

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before Judge Jose Angel. After weeks of hearings the judge dismissed half of the charges and many of the defendants. Infuriated, District Attorney Sanchez impaneled a new Grand Jury, in another county, which is legal under New Mexico’s statutes. The original charges were reinstated. Sanchez decided to prosecute the case himself (he has an “emotional involvement” in the case, said James Thompson, who defeated Sanchez for District Attorney in the next elections) and the death penalty was sought for Tijerina, on the charge of kidnaping. In response Tijerina dismissed his lawyers. He would defend himself. The Prophet explained to his followers, “I had to be un hombre completo, a complete man, for those who follow me. I had to show I was not afraid.” “I stand before you like David before Goliath,” Tijerina told the court. I m not an attorney. I’m just a man against a political con¬ spiracy, a conspiracy by the government, the political machinery, and the press.” He denied that the raid on the courthouse was an attempt to begin a violent revolution of Tierra Amarilla.” He was there simply to help make a citizen’s arrest. So were the armed farmers, who were after all deputy sheriffs of the Pueblo Republica de San Joaquin. He charged that the “violence of the law” had been directed against the villagers. He accused his prosecutor, Alfonso Sanchez, of “murdering my un¬ born child,” by ordering the arrest of his pregnant wife, who had a miscarriage while in the state penitentiary. He told the jury, “Yes, we are guilty of wanting our lands. We are guilty of believing in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. We are guilty of uniting the North. If I deserve to be punished for what I am doing for the poor people, then do it. But you cannot get rid of the land problem by putting Tijerina in jail.” In the trial the under sheriff of Tierra Amarilla, Daniel Rivera, the man Tijerina was accused of kidnaping, faced with the impassioned rhetoric of the defendant, blurted out, “I’m not blaming you for any¬ thing, sir.” Sanchez was adamant. He accused the land-grant leader of organiz¬ ing and guiding the assault on the courthouse, of kidnaping the under sheriff, of deliberate violence and murderous intent. He asked for life imprisonment for Tijerina, at the very least. The State wants you [the jury], based on this crooked, biased

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charge, to send me to the State Penitentiary so they can, like Pilate, wash their hands and say, ‘Well, they [the jury] did it,’ ” Tijerina told the jury. On the wall of an abandoned gas station in Tierra Amarilla someone had written in huge letters, during the trial: IF TIJERINA GOES TO JAIL war!

The jury deliberated briefly. It found Reies Tijerina not guilty. Soon after his triumph Tijerina was jailed. He was seized by New Mexico state policemen and United States forest rangers, at gunpoint, as “a danger to the community.” Led by Ranger James H. Evans, armed with a special paratrooper carbine, and State Policemen Robert Gilliland (“I always shoot at the head. I don’t shoot to maim. I shoot to kill”), the prophet of the land-grant movement was surrounded in High Noon style at the scene of a burning of a National Forest signpost by his followers, on June 8, 1969, near the faithful village of Coyote, where it had all begun. It was two years, almost to the day, since the raid on the courthouse of Tierra Amarilla. The burning of National Forest signposts has replaced the burning of barns in the villages of northern New Mexico. But Tijerina was not arrested on that charge. His bail on an earlier charge—stemming from the picnic at the Carson National Forest, where the Forest Rangers were “arrested” by the land-grant heirs—was revoked. Reies Tijerina was sent to the Federal Penitentiary at El Paso, Texas. El Grito del Norte wrote angrily: “Reies Lopez Tijerina is in jail. A political prisoner, in Texas. And the white racist world which put him there now attempts to breathe deeply, safely, closing its eyes to the ugliness of its lies, turning its face from the foul smell of its ‘justice.’ The smell of the chota (the police) is everywhere. There are many

ways to assassinate a man.” Yet before their leader was jailed once more the villagers held a political fiesta for “the man who defeated the courts.” Joyously they feted the innocence of their prophet. And they danced to his prophecy. In a victory celebration at the barren Lito Ballroom, on the dusty

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Main Street of Tierra Amarilla, Tijerina was exultant. He still faced fifty-one of the fifty-four charges brought against him. And his fellow defendants had not yet been tried at all. Yet, he was joyous. “Our victory in the court was a symbol,” he told the villagers. “Everybody in the world [now] knows about Tierra Amarilla.” On the village street the dust blew about the gloomy courthouse. He pointed toward the building where the drama began. “We don’t be¬ lieve in violence, but we believe in Jesus Christ. The revolution of Tierra Amarilla was like Christ entering the temple and cleaning out the Pharisees. When the jury brought in its verdict that Tijerina was innocent, the justice of God fell on the heads of the powerful,” the Prophet thun¬ dered. “The sky fell on their heads.”

VI

The New Breed

“I went to sleep, and in the morning the sun woke me and that white, how do you say, dew, had covered me, had covered me all over. That night I asked God to show me the future of my life. It shaked me, shaked me like this, it shaked all my life. From there I turned to New Mexico. I saw frozen horses, they started melting and coming to life in a very old kingdom, old walls. Then I saw three Angels of Law, and they asked me to help them. They said they had come from a long ways, had traveled the earth and come for me. Those tall pines I saw meant New Mexico. . . .” He was reborn in his vision. Reies Tijerina tells of his becoming a prophet of the mountain villages as an act of divine revelation. At the moment of his vision he was a fugitive from the jail of a small town in the Arizona desert, hiding amid the cacti on the scorched slopes of the barren Tortilla Mountains. He was hungry and pursued. But that hardly mattered. The frozen horses of snow who beckoned to him from the fiery desert sky in that spring of 1957 were a “sign” that he dared not doubt, or disobey. The Lord had chosen him on the mountain. He had no choice but to follow the frozen horses. He offered himself as a martyr to the prophecy, and he went over the mountain to New Mexico, to his destiny, or his death.

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“He will be murdered!” one of his faithful followers says. “Reies is a sacrifice. He knows it, too.” In the brief years since that moment Reies Tijerina has become one of the mythic leaders of La Raza. He is “the Most Hated Man in New Mexico,” a television network announces to the nation. He is also the most beloved, and the most feared. Attempts are repeatedly made to kill him. On the night of April 16, 1968, a former sheriffs deputy of Ber¬ nalillo County, William R. Fellion, bombs the office of the Prophet in the headquarters of the Alianza—the Alliance of Free City-States. The awkward assassin falls on his dynamite and blows off his right hand, trailing blood down the streets of Albuquerque in his escape. Police capture him, finding another stick of dynamite in a lunchbox in his blood-splattered car. Municipal Judge James A. Maloney, later New Mexico Attorney General, dismisses the “deadly weapon” charge. And a Bernalillo County grand jury clears the former sheriffs deputy of a “dangerous use of explosives” charge. He is sentenced to work for sixteen hours in the County Medical Center. Rifle shots from a speeding car shatter the office windows on another night, during a meeting in the winter of 1968. There are no arrests. In June, 1969, the crowded hall is shot up again by terrorists. Still no arrests. There “are repeated bombings, shootings and rock throwings—what amounts to a campaign of crime and terror against the Alianza,” comments the New Mexico Review and Legislative Jour¬ nal. Houses of land-grant heirs are bombed. Cars are shot up on the downtown city streets. Ranches are burned. The arsonists set afire the villagers health clinic of the Rio Arriba Cooperative in Tierra Amarilla. The children of Tijerina’s followers are threatened with kidnap¬ ing and murder. The members of the Alianza are gassed when powdered tear gas is secreted in their cars; one man is hospitalized and eight others affected by the gas attacks. Yet, when asked about “any suspects” or anticipation of “any arrests,” the Deputy Chief of the Albuquerque Police, Albert T. Swallows, shrugs: “I’d rather not com¬ ment.” In two years of terrorism there is not a single arrest. In the midst of these attacks the leader of the extremist Minutemen, Robert DePugh, and his chief assistant, Walter Peyson, are caught by

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the F.B.I. in a hideout in a small New Mexico town, south of Al¬ buquerque. The cache of arms and bombs captured is so large that a listing fills twenty-four pages. It includes dynamite, grenades, home¬ made pipebombs, hundreds of fuses, an armory of rifles, shotguns and revolvers, twenty-five cans of cyanide gas, bows and arrows equipped to carry bombs, aerial maps of the land-grant villages, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. The Albuquerque Journal mentions “a lengthy Minuteman membership list,” which vanishes. Local lawenforcement men are rumored to be on the list. Fabian Duran, the Assistant Security Chief of the Alianza, tells reporters that his informants on the police force have warned him that the opponents of Tijerina are “going to pay someone” to assassinate him. After their arrest, in the summer of 1969, the Minuteman leaders are hurriedly whisked out of the state. The office of the Prophet is bombed three times in a few months. He escapes injury, but one bomb explodes within a few feet of his wife and children. Curiously, no one is ever injured. “Very accurate misses,” someone says. A guard is posted at the Prophet’s door. He is a taciturn, tall man wearing the wool vest of a shepherd. Wherever the leader of the land-grant movement goes he is accompanied by a bodyguard. On the roof of the headquarters there are men with rifles stationed at. night, like sentries. The meeting hall of the Alianza is quiet as an empty garage. On the wall is a sign: “Caballeros de las indias”—the “Gentlemen of the Indies.” But for this it is an unpretentious and nondescript building. The windows, broken by bombs and bullets, have been bricked and boarded up. Nowhere is there any visible fear. Inside the hall some old men are laughing at the antics of a psychedelic band on the television set. On his desk Reies Tijerina has a bust of Socrates. A small flag of gold, red, and blue with the single word “Justicia” is beside the philosopher’s head. The shabby walls are covered with a fascinating array: a map of “Spain in the History of the United States,” a facsimile of the Declaration of Independence, an informal portrait of the late John F. Kennedy and his wife, a rosy-cheeked calendar Christ, and a

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roadsign used when the villagers of the Alianza “liberated” the Kit Carson National Forest and re-established their independent republic: PROCLAMATION IN THE NAME OF GOD ALMIGHTY PUEBLO REPUBLICA DE SAN JOAQUIN DEL RIO DE CHAMA

Reies Tijerina appears from the rear of the hall, where he has been napping. He brushes a mop of hair from his stark, handsome face. He is younger than one expects, almost boyish. “I was having a rest,” he apologizes. “You look weary.” “Sometimes there is no rest.” “Politics can kill a man.” He looks surprised. In his face there is a sadness. He smiles and says simply, “If I die, I die.” A man dies, and is reborn, many times in his life. Reies Lopez Tijerina was born in a farm worker’s shack. “I was born in the Depres¬ sion days,” he says. “All my life a migrant.” The memory of poverty blots out much. He was actually born in 1927. He was a child of migrants, whose family picked cotton in Texas and sugar beets in Colorado, as he did as a boy. He traveled in the jalopy caravans of the Okies and he grew up in the migrant camps. It was an ordinary childhood. Untaught by the schools, he was a pupil for only three years. He remembers his brief schooling with the bitter taste of the garbage pails he rummaged in for his lunches on the way to class. As a child he learned about life from life; he is still suspicious of textbook knowl¬ edge. “What learning I got I learned by candlelight. There was no chance for me, the son of a migrant, to get an education.” He was born again in the Bible. “I learned to read by reading the Holy Bible,” he says. When he was twelve someone gave him a Spanish Bible. He taught himself to read “by studying the Psalms and Proverbs.” The biblical language has stayed with him, even in everyday conversation. At nineteen he attended an Evangelical Bible School, at Ysleta de

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Sur, Texas. He became a circuit preacher in the Assembly of God Church, a fundamentalist sect. Journeying from town to town throughout the Southwest with his wife and children, he preached in bare village churches, barrio homes, and revival tents and on street comers. “I saw the miserable situation of my people,” Tijerina says. “I gave my life to them.” He was born a third time in a town named the Valley of Peace. In the deserts of Arizona there was a handful of poor campesinos who had bought an arid piece of land on the irrigated flat between the Maricopa Indian Reservation and the Tortilla Mountains, which they hoped to farm cooperatively. The Reverend Tijerina came to preach in the town they optimistically named the Valley of Peace. It wasn’t. The buying of land by the landless upset the old landowners. A few of the houses of the Mexicans were burned in the night. The families were run off their land, and the Reverend Tijerina and his parishioners landed in jail. Not comprehending why they were jailed when it was their houses that had been burned, they broke out of the jailhouse. Tijerina, who had remained in his cell, was rearrested for engineering the jailbreak. He says his life was threatened when he was released on bail, and he quickly left the Valley of Peace. Sheriff Coy De Arman of Florence, Arizona, declared, “Tijerina should be considered extremely dangerous. He is known to be an escape artist.” “I have nothing to be ashamed of,” Tijerina says. “Unless to save your life is wrong.” Although he had jumped bail and landed in the headlines, the local authorities did not extradite him, and the charges against him were permitted to expire. They did not seem unhappy to see him go over the mountain. They wanted the land, they did not want him, the troublesome Reverend now thinks. The roots of the trouble were in the earth, Tijerina decided. Land was the soul of the poor villagers. He would search for the roots—“the soul of my people”—in order to be able to preach the message of their salvation. In digging into the history of the land he unearthed the lost land grants that the Spanish and Mexican governments had once

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given to original settlers of the Southwest. He was amazed. “I dedi¬ cated my life to research to make sure these land grants were legal.” And he explored the old archives in Mexico and Spain for proof. In the villages of northern New Mexico he discovered farmers who still had memories, and copies, of their land grants. He decided that in these mountains he would make his stand. “Destiny and the cry of the people were calling for a man who would take over the land-grant struggle.” He merely answered the call. He left his church, but not his pulpit. “I have not left the fear of God,” Tijerina says, “the ways of truth I still feel. The kind of justice I pursue, I found the first taste of it in the Bible, but not fully. It was in the world among my people, among the struggles of my people, that I found the virtues of justice. “So I am proud and have no regrets. I was of little use to my people as a preacher. There were too many preachers.” On February 2, 1962, Tijerina founded the Alianza Federal de Mercedes to fight for the land. He recalls there were fifteen or so who came to his meetings in what was then a printshop. “It was like talking to a block of ice. They sat there like a block of ice. My words chipping away on that block of ice for three years. Three years!” One man who was there in the beginning called it “El Sueno Loco”—The Mad Dream. “I had discovered the lost identity of my people,” Tijerina says. “Where? It is in the Laws of the Indies that I had discovered the place for my people in history. “We were born out of a law. It was the Law of King Philip II, of Spain, that he established on October 19, in the year of 1514: Law II, Title I, Book VI, of the Laws of the Indies. This was the strongest of all the Laws of the Kings of Spain. It was to legalize the matrimony, by marriage, between the Indians and the Spaniards. Through this marriage we were born. “The Indian was our mother. The Spaniard was our father, yes, but the Indian was our true mother. Our father, the Spaniard, left us. We decided to stay with our mother, the Indian, here in New Mexico. This was our country. The land was our birthplace. We were a New Breed. As all New Breeds,

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we were bom as the consequence of a conflict of races and cultures, when the Spaniards discovered, explored, and christianized this con¬ tinent. Out of that conflict came a New Breed, a new people. This new people is sometimes known as lospeones, the peons. Sometimes we are known as La Raza, which is The Race, The People. But the name we are known by does not matter. We are a New Breed. “We are like the Hebrews in Egypt. It is said that when they went into Egypt the Hebrews were a weak people, they were in bondage; but now they are a strong people, many millions of people. After four hundred years of bondage we consider ourselves a strong, big, multi¬ plied people. For the last four hundred years we have been growing and developing. Until now, like many other people in recorded his¬ tory, we have our beginning. I think we are just beginning to live, just beginning to taste life. “Like the Hebrews in Egypt we are just now becoming free of our bondage,” Tijerina exclaims. The Prophet envisions the genesis of his people in his mind; he is exhilarated by his thoughts. He talks with a religious ecstasy. Words pour forth with such excitement that he seems to be experiencing his prophecy at the very moment he is talking. In his voice there is a fanaticism that has frightened his enemies. One of his close friends says of him, “Reies is the product of a medie¬ val age and pentecostal eschatology.” Yet, within the fury of his messianic vision he retains a remarkably calm belief in the inevitable cycles of life that is strangely Indian. He goes from biblical exhortation to the folk wisdom of migrant camp and mountain village in one breath. “My grandfather and my father would talk of a time when all things would be right, when everybody would be friends with everybody,” he says. “Though they were ignorant people and had no education, very little, they had the natural feelings of the animal world. The animal world has an instinct; they can feel when a storm, or flood, is coming. Especially the sheep. They get together, every animal. Well, the poor people of the world, the New Breeds, somehow, it is hard to explain, they can feel when something is changing, when a great change is coming about. “We are expecting this great change. The Negroes are expecting

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this great change, they feel it. That’s why they are jumping, breaking the barriers, and yelling, and respecting nothing that gets in their way. Because the Negroes can feel the future. And so can we, the New Breed. “I say, We got all the time in the world. We are in no hurry. We are clean of national crimes. We have never been a nation. We have not oppressed anybody. We have not stolen the lands of anybody. The New Breed is ready to be just, to be used by justice, to bring justice. It is hard for justice to reveal itself to an old, corrupt power. But it is easy for the New Breed. “So we are not in a hurry. We need more time to develop. Time is running out for the United States, for Russia, for England, for the old powers. But not for us. “A people with this belief will go a long way. They will sacrifice everything. They will sacrifice money. They will unite with the Indian, with the Negro, with everybody. They will work hard to establish harmony between the races and people, to destroy barriers, to bury hatred, and to pursue justice without accumulating hatred, and to avoid the mistakes that every nation has committed in ruling empires with hatred. “Our intent is to put a stop to hatred between people. We don’t need hatred. We are not afraid of anybody. “We are not alone. We are just a small picture of the universal and cosmic picture,” Tijerina says. “We are just part of history and of this continent. In a very few years there will be 600 million Latin Ameri¬ cans south of the Rio Grande. These are our brothers. Yes, we are but a small grain of sand belonging to a great mass, a great people. Even though we are few, the whole world will force the United States to negotiate with theXatin American people, under the Latin American peoples’ terms. That is, under terms of justice. “Even though the United States has played the ignorant, the role of the ignorant, ignoring us, ignoring our pleas, our marches, our activities, our claims, our demands, we feel that eventually the United States will have to heed our cries. The whole world is the jury. The whole world is looking toward the United States.” In a booklet of his Alianza there is a sharper warning: “The days

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of hopelessness of the Spanish people of New Mexico are numbered. The Anglo should read this handwriting on the wall and make allow¬ ance for it in their hearts and lives. The Anglos should not forget the Mano Negra (the Black Hand) movement in New Mexico, earlier in the century. Vigilance committees and vendetta movements are al¬ ways terrible for both sides. But if the Alianza loses the confidence of the Spanish people [it] can no longer guide them upon a proper course of action within the law. ...” “Do you agree with this threat?” I ask Reies Tijerina. “What threat?” “It sounds like a declaration of war.” “Yes, there will be a war of races,” Tijerina replies quietly. “Hatred will build up. There will be a great clash of race against race around the world. Yes, a war of races. After that we will live like brothers. Like one family of races, I believe.” He is not talking of riots and rebellions. The Prophet is talking of nothing less than the Armageddon. “Communist!” is the accusation hurled at his biblical rhetoric. The former District Attorney of Santa Fe County, Alfonso Sanchez, has gone so far as to publicly accuse Tijerina’s followers of being trained in the political guerrillaism of Fidel Castro’s “Cuban Communism.” Sanchez has implied that the mountain villagers of the Alianza may be training in northern New Mexico for a revolution. “I don’t know much about Communism or Marxism,” Tijerina scoffs. “Communism is just another European political system to me, just as corrupt as any other political system. We don’t need it.” He condemns the “Russian Empire,” as he does the “British Empire.” “The old powers are dying,” says the Prophet. “We are being born. “The Communists are no threat to the rich, the oppressors, in New Mexico. We are a threat to them.” The contempt with which Tijerina dismisses the political conflict dividing the Western world is echoed by as different a man as Luis Valdez, the poet of El Teatro Campesino of California’s farm workers. “Marx and Hegel were European. What have they got to say to us?” asks Valdez. “The Aztecs had a communal society before Commu¬ nism was ever heard of in Europe. I think Motecuhzoma has more to

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teach us than Marx. Our ideology is in this earth, this continent.” In Los Angeles a young leader of the Brown Berets, Carlos Montes, agrees. “Communism? That’s a white thing. It’s their trip, not ours.” “La Raza has its own political ideology,” Tijerina says. “We don’t have to borrow anybody’s secondhand politics.” The belief of the Prophet is in his prophecy, in any event, more than in his politics. He is a messenger of divine revelation, whose text he has witnessed him¬ self, whose message he bears. Politics is religious to the Prophet. When he briefly campaigned for Governor of New Mexico, Tijerina began his political drive with a pilgrimage, on foot, to the miraculous Sanctuary of the Black Christ of Chimayo. He journeyed to the historic shrine of the Penitente Brotherhood to “demonstrate the sincerity of his political intentions.” He told reporters, “Many go to Rome, or to the Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe, in Mexico. I come here to Chimayo, on foot. I have no other way to tell the people that I serve them.” “To serve the people is to serve God,” Tijerina said. It is his political credo. His prophecies mix religion and politics rather freely. The middleclass Hispanos of Santa Fe and the suburban barrios of Albuquerque are uncomfortable with his rhetorical visions. “Reies Tijerina? He is a clever faker,” they say. “He is a revival-tent politician,” and “He embarrasses the respectable Mexican Americans, the way he speaks.” They joke about his land-grant demands: “I talked to Tijerina,” says a low-ranking official, of an old Hispano family, “and he offered me the City of Santa Fe if I will support him.” “That’s nothing,” says another. “He offered me the State of Texas.” “What did you say?” “Reies, I said, let’s make a deal. You keep the State of Texas. Then I will support you.” In the days of the caudillos, the Mexican warlords, and the des¬ perados of Pancho Villa, he would have had his place, they say. The Savior turned dictator is out of place in the sophisticated politics of today. One of the directors of the Community Action Programs of New Mexico, Rudolph F. Baca, says archly: “Many people say Tijerina is an effective spokesman of the people. All I can say is that

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we disagree on the basic issue—how a program is run. His movement is not democratic. It is a one-man show.” Some of the Hispano officials go further. He is nothing but a bandito to them, a rabble-rouser and a “tool of the Communists.” The man is a charlatan; he is too intelligent to believe the nonsense he tells people; his prophecies are a ruse to fool the village fools. “I consider him an enemy of the country,” says United States Senator Joseph Montoya (Democrat of New Mexico). “When he calls this nation of ours a prostitute, I say he’s a damned liar, and if he doesn’t like the nation and what it stands for he can get the hell out.” Tijerina is an “exploiter, discredited charlatan, impostor, and racist,” says the New Mexican Senator; and as for his land-grant movement —it is “just a racket.” “He takes the savings of people who follow him in order to fatten his purse.” Tijerina’s reply is a shrug: “Of course they have a right to ask, ‘What’s in this for Tijerina?’ But for me I wouldn’t even stop to give an answer. They do not know what justice is. They think in terms of money or land. Many people tell me, ‘If we win, Mr. Tijerina, we the people of Antonchico, we the people of Tierra Amarilla, will give you so many acres.’ I don’t even answer. I don’t want to hurt their feelings. But to me, it’s nonsense. I don’t think in terms of land or money. If I can see, with my own eyes, justice taking over the State of New Mexico, that will be my reward. “I am a patriotic son and child of the United States,” he says. “I love my country as much as anyone does, but the Constitution doesn’t compel me to go along with the actions of every U.S. agent, or U.S. Senator.” The landed Hispanos and the official politicians do not all ridicule the land-grant prophet, or fear him. The resentment toward the East¬ erners’ real-estate zeal has been after-dinner talk for more than a century. In the genteel society of New Mexico, among the scions of the old families, hereditary bankers and gentlemen ranchers, and even among the Hispano officials (some of whom publicly prosecute Tijerina), there is often delight and quiet laughter at the embarrass¬ ment that Tijerina has caused the Anglo establishment.

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One such man is Paul Vigil. Vigil has a Texan’s leathery, sun-dried skin (though he would bridle at the word Texan), his red hair whiten¬ ing, his eyes hard as a prairie hawk’s, his hands sure of themselves. He was a rancher in eastern New Mexico, near the Texas line. “I ran a big herd. Sold $60,000 a year in cattle, some years. Well, I guess I spent twenty-seven years of my life building that place before I was run off,” he says. “I was alone there, the only Spanish rancher. There were neighbors I had for years, and they turned against me. Even my banker, he was an old friend, a good man, he cut off my credit. He told me they made him do it, those Texans. We had a Cosa Texas there, or maybe we have a Nuestra Texas here. Well, I know some kind Anglos. Not the Tex¬ ans, though. The Texans want power. Power is all they are interested in: power and money.” Vigil has a decisive voice, the sort that is used to giving orders and not being crossed. He says, “They say the Spanish wouldn’t know what to do with the land if we did get it back. I am going to curse now, forgive me. Well, I say to that, bullshit! “I say we were cattle-ranching before they came here. There are things I could still teach the Texans about ranching.” He is one of the faithful of the Alianza. There are many like him who have been denied the inheritance of their land and who feel they have been disinherited. Few of these support Tijerina, but they are sympathetic to his movement. In the days after the courthouse insurrection, a high La Raza politi¬ cian confided to a friend, “You know what that bastard Tijerina has done to me? He has questioned my whole life. All my life has been based on my denying I am a Mexican to myself. My life has been a denial of what I am. Now I have to decide whether I am lying to myself. Now, there are two sides of me and I have to decide which one I am.” The politician cursed. “I hate that bastard for that. Who appointed him my conscience?” It is a personal thing. Unforgiving of those who have made it out of the barrios, away from the villages, and who look back with alms and guilt upon those they left behind, Tijerina has been known to turn the back of his hand on their offers. He is hard on his benefactors.

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The turmoil that catapulted the Prophet into the headlines brought many offerings. One “Luncheon Club” of La Raza businessmen and professionals in a Southwesterp city offered the Alianza hundreds of dollars in support. Tijerina was so touched he told his benefactors he would speak at their “Luncheon Club,” in gratitude. No, that would not do! came the startled reply: If the local newspapers heard that Tijerina was addressing them, they would be ruined! Would the Alianza send another speaker! Tijerina refused their money. The de¬ ceits of ordinary politics do not appear to interest him. What he says is, “I have no time for this.” “Sometimes when we are discussing tactics and organization, I see he is not listening,” one of the young admirers of Tijerina says. “I look at him and know by his eyes that he is thinking of something else.” An older man, a veteran of New Mexican politics and sympathetic to the land-grant movement, though not a member, says, “Reies is limited in his knowledge of organization. It is something he has to learn, or they will cut him to ribbons. He is not political enough. He does not know what to do next. He is the greatest leader we have in New Mexico. There is no question about that. But he has to learn organization.” “He trusts too much,” says one of his supporters. “He trusts the truth too much. I tell him, Reies be careful, they will betray you; but he trusts ‘the truth of justice,’ he says, and will not listen.” “Our belief is founded in justice, in one God, in punishment for the evildoer after resurrection,” Tijerina responds. “Justice is a power. Justice will synchronize the creation as it was thousands of years ago. Justice will finally settle the scores of the rich and the poor. Justice is the only weapon left for the poor people, the humble people. Justice has no need of bullets and bombs. Justice has accomplished more according to recorded history than all the empires that have used powder and the sword to conquer, to enforce their law and order. Justice is the law of God. “Justice will become human, become incarnated. Like the Christ who was born in the likeness of man, a human being. That is how justice will appear to us. That is our strong belief. Like the uranium238 that was discovered and converted into energy to explode bombs and generate power, we discovered the energy; the moving spirit of

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the people is in justice. It is a power so strong that it can kill you or make you strong. But it needs cultivation. “We have to materialize justice! Justice will become life within our life. Our belief in justice is so strong that we can see and hear justice being transformed into human beings. We can feel the elements, the power of justice, using our mouths, our feet, our eyes, our hands, our hearts. We can equate justice with the common needs of mankind— like the oxygen, the air we breathe. Mankind should build a monu¬ ment to justice as evidence that for the first time in history justice has become human.” The Prophet knows that he has shaken the status quo of poverty with his prophecies. Wherever he has gone—leading the Poor People’s March to the nation’s capital, helping found the La Raza Unida (The United People) movement in South Texas, preaching “the power of justice” to the Chicano university students of California, or by defying and defeating the courts of New Mexico—Tijerina has become the incarnation of his own visions. “It doesn’t matter what he (Tijerina) does, it doesn’t matter what he says, it doesn’t matter if he never runs for office. Everyone has to be for, or against, anything he says or does. He has driven a wedge into the political setup in this state, and maybe the Southwest,” says Gov¬ ernor David Cargo, of New Mexico. He disagrees with the methods and he doubts the goals of the land-grant prophet, the Governor quickly explains. But, he adds, “I tell you, Reies Tijerina is the man to beat in this state.” The Governor leans back in his leather chair beneath the gigantic Seal of New Mexico. He contemplates the seven figures of Santos that cast a peculiar calm about the tumultuous executive office. “I don’t say Tijerina did it by himself. But the people in the villages will never be the same again. They want to be independent. They are tired of being told what to do by politicians. “Maybe—” the Governor smiles—“they are tired of listening to Tijerina, too.” A sense of history has followed in the footsteps of the Prophet, so closely that sometimes it overwhelms him. He is weary. He realizes that the young men who have come after him, into the breakthrough he has made, will be able to go further than he did, more confidently

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and with more sophistication. “Revolutionary movements go far beyond the goal conceived by their original theorists,” says Jesus Silva Herzog, a Mexican political writer and former director of the School of Economics of the University of Mexico. It has already happened to Tijerina. The villagers have begun to create their own farming cooperatives, educational programs, and land-reform campaigns without him. The disciples of the Prophet— the mountain youth of the Comancheros del Norte, the Brown Berets in the barrios of Santa Fe and Albuquerque, the Chicano activists of the United Mexican American Students (UMAS) at the University of New Mexico—have begun to dispute his messianic style of politics, argue with his rhetoric, and challenge his leadership. “He is oldfashioned,” a student leader complains. “Our movement has out¬ grown his revival tent.” “The force of the collective drags the leaders beyond their purposes. If they try to oppose that irresistible force, the power of the mass will either eliminate or destroy them,” declares Jesus Silva Herzog. Reies Tijerina is philosophical. Yet he is bitter. He jealously holds onto his prophecy. He does not understand the etiquette of democ¬ racy; a prophet rarely does. “Betrayal” becomes a favored word of his vocabulary. The inner circle of trusted lieutenants around La Mesa (The Table) that directs the Alianza grows smaller and smaller, as the organizations of La Raza in New Mexico become more numerous and varied. He knows he is creating the very forces that seek to depose him. “I am no longer organizing villagers,” he says. “I am organizing organizers. I am organizing organizations.” / “What will happen to you?” he is asked. “A man is just one man. I will die for what I believe,” Tijerina says. “The other men, maybe they will die for something else.” Once more he will become “the outsider,” the wandering preacher, the son of a migrant. “All my life a migrant.” “Christ was an outsider, too,” he says. “Like the Christ who was born in the image of man, a human being, justice will be born in my people, the New Breed. I hold fast to the dream of our rebirth.” In the world of Reies Tijerina the advent of justice will be like a

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cosmic epiphany. He foresees the sweep of history in his prophecy. He shakes his fists and yells to the heavens when he talks, imploring the Almighty God to hear his voice. If no one listens to him in his audi¬ ence, he does not hear them. “He talks to God,” the villagers say.

VII

The Death and Resurrection of the Rural Village

One cold winter not too long ago a young reporter journeyed into the villages in the state of New Mexico. He saw death. The houses were boarded up, half of their people gone. “A man splits wood for his stove. And only a dog hears the noise of his ax,” Peter Nabokov wrote in the Santa Fe New Mexican. “The villages are dying.” Years before the coming of mechanized farming the villages were “doomed.” In the colonial Spanish era in the old Southwest it was evident that “beyond a mere livelihood incentive stopped, bowing to a stone wall of inevitability. And a dry rot set in,” the Reverend Ross Calvin wrote twenty years ago in his Sky Determines: An Interpreta¬ tion of the Southwest. His requiem was the usual one bf the Anglo for those whom he had conquered: “A stronger race came and took away their inheritance.” And yet what else could one expect from the “illiterate, half savage proletariat,” as the historical writer Harvey Fergusson has contemptu¬ ously described the Hispano villagers of the Southwest. In the villages the earth too was dead. The earth was no longer sacred: it was fertilized by chemicals, not by the sun, plowed by machines, not by men, measured by market prices, not by its own beauty.

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The strangers, many of them, were city men before they came into the wilderness. Who among them worships the gods of the earth? The Hispano villagers of New Mexico do. So do the Mexican farm workers of the Southwest, the descendants of Indian and Spanish farmers, who lived in communal villages, with a reverence for the earth. They sowed seeds to grow food, not to profit. They were outmoded, bypassed by progress. “The destruction of the Spanish American village economy and social structure” is at hand, Dr. Clark Knowlton of the University of Texas informed a recent meeting of the Rural Sociological Society. His gloomy view, so common among the knowing, beholds the villages as “a large distressed region marked by poverty, functional illiteracy, unemployment, high rates of welfare payments, poor educational fea¬ tures, emigration, apathy and ethnic bitterness.” Elsewhere Dr. Knowlton has questioned the “continued existence” of the villages. “Problematical,” he guesses. It is true that emigration from the farms to the cities in the past twenty years has been greater than the flood of European immigrants into the ghettos during the peak years of the exodus—1896 to 1915. The refugees from the countryside numbered 17.5 million from 1940 to 1960. And still they come at the rate of almost one million a year. Mostly the young and restless, they fill the new ghettos with longing and discontent. Lopsided crowding has squeezed 70 per cent of the people into 3 per cent of the land. The trail of the refugees is every¬ where the same as in the Southwest. The folks down on the farms have decreased from 32 million in 1910 to 12.3 million in 1965. So, too, have the farms disappeared in those years, from 6,361,502 to about 3,000,000 today. Half of those remaining are barely subsistence farms, whose crops account for a mere 3 per cent of the agricultural market. Jobs in rural areas have evaporated. In the years before World War I one-third of the people labored on the land, but by the mid-1960’s only 6 per cent of the people had rural employment. In a doomsday prophecy titled “The Decline and Fall of the Small Town,” in the emporium of social scientism Trans-action (April, 1967), two moody sociologists, William Simon and John H. Gagnon,

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dissected the corpus delicti of three small towns in Southern Illinois —with little glee but no regrets. Simon and Gagnon, senior research¬ ers at the Institute for Sexual Research at the University of Indiana —where they are specialists in the study of “adjustment of male homosexuals”—deviated from their normal scholarly pursuits to ex¬ coriate the ghosts of small-town life. They tried, but they failed. Life in these small towns is “doomed,” the sociologists decided. The “local amenities must deteriorate,” the towns themselves “will be¬ come isolated and decayed,” and soon only “the aged, the inept, the very young—and the local power elite” will be left on the dilapidated and dying Main Streets. Not that the small towns cannot compete with the cities, but they won’t, the sociologists wrote. “Redevelopment is not a promise but a threat to the ideologies of small town life.” Quiet and neighborly concerns, the belief in traditional ways, and “a strongly anti-urban system of values,” such as a “rejection of purely mercenary values,” convinced the sociologists thaf small towns were a drag on progress, an anachronism that had to succumb to history. “They must lose their best people,” who presumably do not believe in these outmoded ideas, and those “who return will be failures,” who are satisfied with “the second best in our competitive society.” The perverse and bygone literary farmer from Texas, Stanley Walker, extended this harsh view into the countryside. In his tirade of a few years ago, The Myth of the Family Farm, he wrote: “Far from being sturdy, valiant yeomen who should be preserved these people are for the most part born leeches. They hate their work. They make rural slums.”

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The requiem varies, yet it is everywhere the same. The ghost towns of the old mining camps in the Rockies, the abandoned farm towns on the Dakota plains, the deserted country crossroads in the cotton delta, the decaying adobes of the Hispano villages—these are all ruins of a dying way of life. Our countryside has become a cemetery of beautiful memories. . . . Alex Mercure, a quiet man not given to outbursts, is nonetheless angered by the prophecies of doom. He is the State Director of the Home Education Livelihood Program

(help)

of New Mexico, proba-

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bly the most successful attempt at the revival of village economy and pride in the whole country. “Villages are not dead,” he says. “Some of the experts believe that rural life is no longer functional. That rural society has collapsed beyond any possibility of rebuilding. It is not so! “What do the experts know of our village life?” Mercure scoffs. “Our villages have many human resources. People!” They know how to organize and run their own Cattle Growers Associations, and how to manage Water Users and Ditch Associations. They practice their own village democracy. They have religious strengths. They have the framework of strong families, though these have been weakened by the welfare system. They have their native skills—woodworking and weaving—that could be profitable for them. Most of all, says Mercure, “they know how to enjoy life.” “Communal life still exists in the villages,” Mercure says. “It is not entirely the shadow that the experts see from the outside. It is a reality. And that communal life may be our greatest strength. These are the seeds of the revival of village life. Can these seeds be regenerated? I think so. “Gandhi in India advocated a cottage industry. That may have been all right for India. But not here. What is cottage industry in an indus¬ trial country such as this but handicrafts and art crafts? That benefits just one man. And a Gifte Shoppe. It is archaic. It won’t help a whole village. Look what the government’s Indian Arts and Crafts program has done to stop poverty on the reservations. Not much. “We need village industry,” he says. “Small village industry that can revive the village. A village does not need a large plant, or huge investment. That would only destroy the village completely. No, we need native industry that would employ maybe ten, or twenty, people. Because ten jobs would feed one hundred people. That will mean more jobs in the grocery store, the post office, the gas station, the tavern. That’s all a village needs to survive.” More than fifty village industries and cooperatives have been begun by the help project. Established in 1965 under the sponsorship of the New Mexico Council of Churches and the Roman Catholic Archdi¬ ocese of Santa Fe, and supported by Ford Foundation and OEO

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grants, help seeks to aid “the poorest of the poor” in the villages, who “never had a true sense of community.” Its aims are straightforward and simple. The training of job skills “based on the skill needs of the community” is a prosaic enough beginning. So too is its second goal: the setting up of farming cooperatives to help stabilize “small family¬ sized farms.” And finally, it hopes to help “small business enterprises to utilize existing handcraft skills.” “We are rebuilding the villages,” Mercure says. “You know why we are succeeding where so many have failed? Because we practice oldfashioned democracy. I am very conservative about that.” “The most conservative program in existence today,” Governor Cargo of New Mexico agrees. But the old ranchers, with hard-lined faces, are leery of help’s program to encourage the self-reliance of the Hispano villagers. They cite an accusation of nefarious subversion, “The Communist Plot to Grab the Southwest,” by Alan Stang, that appeared in American Opinion, a supposed John Birch Society publi¬ cation, which implied that Mercure and the help program were part of a “plot” to “grab” the land of the Anglos. “I thought the conservatives would support us,” Mercure says, shaking his head with a bewildered smile. “All we are doing is en¬ couraging individualism and free enterprise and old-fashioned initia¬ tive. Isn’t that what everybody always says they want? “Everybody is suspicious of our ‘power.’ What power? Look at our directors,” he says. “On the Board of Trustees of help are six farm workers, five church lay leaders; in the villages, two ministers, one banker, one businessman, and a Catholic nun. What’s suspicious about that?” In the villages the self-help programs are run by the villagers them¬ selves. One village has a woodworkers’ cooperative where they make chairs for kindergartens; another makes wooden crates. There are farm-machinery cooperatives and apple-marketing cooperatives and vegetable farmers’ cooperatives. There are health clinics that the vil¬ lagers build and run. In one village famous for its weaving, until recently a dying art, the craftsmen are encouraged to establish a weavers’ cooperative. The villagers-decide on their needs and develop solutions that the farmers and artisans wish.

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“Too many decisions are forced (on the poor) and consequently are resented rather than responsibly met,” Mercure says. His philosophy is simply to help the villages decide what to do, with capital loans and technical aid. Eight of these villages have set up credit unions run by and for the poor farmers and farm workers. “If you want to help people let them tell you what they need,” Mercure says. “Let them decide. Never impose your needs on them. You are only fooling yourself that you are helping them. You aren’t fooling them. “All this middle-class nonsense of trying to teach people to be middle class on $1,500 a year. What good does it do?” The urban programs thought up in government offices by middle-class planners just confuse the villagers, he says. “Rural people don’t need them. Learning to push an elevator button! Now what good does that do a farmer?” Even though these programs may be offered with the best of intentions he feels they stifle the initiative of the rural poor. “ ‘We want to do something for you,’ they say. They can’t do anything for us. They don’t understand that,” Mercure says. In the beginning of the War on Poverty he thought these govern¬ ment programs might offer new hope. He fears that hope has been betrayed, as do many others. “We thought that they would be of some service to the people,” says Fecundo Valdez, who too has worked on OEO projects. “But as it turned out, on many occasions they have been a deterrent. In a way the War on Poverty has speeded up the actual displacement of people in the rural areas.” The frustrations of villagers brought about by governmental prom¬ ises and congressional withdrawals has been picaresquely portrayed by Lauro Garcia, a young village leader in the farm workers’ commu¬ nity of Guadalupe, Arizona: “It’s like having a beautiful woman. She excites you. She entices you. You are ready. Then she closes her legs. And you get nothing. Just frustrated. You feel humiliated. You feel like killing her. That’s the way you get frustrated by the promise of these government pro¬ grams. Because they don’t deliver what they promise. And you are left holding the bag. “We have a saying for that in Spanish,” says Garcia, “but it’s not polite.”

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The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh attitude of the agencies dealing with the Hispano villages is not the creation of the OEO. It is the traditional way of the government. “Our people do not trust the government. Gobierno! That’s almost a curse word,” says Fecundo Valdez; the patron and the peon have too often been preserved in the attitudes, procedures, and institutions of the government. Much of the rural Southwest, and most of all New Mexico, is treated like a colony by the rest of the country, Mercure says. “We export our raw materials and we import the finished products. Isn’t that the way it is in a colonial country?” he asks bitterly. “Like poor colonials we are kept in a state of dependency and indebtedness. And condescension is the political expression of this. “I told this to the Executive Committee of the New Mexico Legisla¬ ture,” Mercure says. “I told them, Do you know that of all the hides of all the cattle in this state not one hide is tanned in this state? Do you know that all the hay and straw that is grown for brooms, that the villages could make into brooms if they had small industry, that all this hay and straw is sent out of the state? Do you know that we import 70 per cent of the food we eat in this state, though this is an agricul¬ tural state? “We are a colonial country. That’s why we are poor. And we will have to change that ourselves.” The villages are not dying, says Fecundo Valdez: the villages are being methodically and deliberately killed by the urbanization policy of the government. “It’s a sociological murder!” he says. “No effort is really made to increase the land base of these people. Their lands are taken from them. Why? Because all government pro¬ grams are geared to complete urbanization,” Valdez charges. “Not just by the centralization of bureaucracy, but of rural life. Services are further and further removed from the villages. The villages are de¬ pleted. If the schools are consolidated, for example, that means the people in the rural areas have to move nearer the schools. Why? Because there are no roads, good roads, in many of these villages. The government builds superhighways that bypass the villages entirely and kill the small businesses. But they are reluctant to build country roads. Yes, we have more of these micro-urban cities. And the extended villages are killed.

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“Bureaucratic bumbling? Yes, but it is also a conscious effort to displace the people from rural areas,” he says. In an article written for Fortune magazine, “The Southern Roots of Urban Crisis” (August, 1968), Roger Beardwood searchingly explores “the malaise of the rural South.” He finds it no economic accident. “Since World War II, U.S. agricultural policy has encouraged the sweeping mechanization of farming in the South,” Beardwood writes. “The resulting migrations are inexorable results of policies and pro¬ grams devised by the agricultural committees of Congress in which white Southerners have long had a dominant voice. Encouraged and financially aided by the Department of Agriculture, southern farmers are using modern technology that constantly raises the productivity of both labor and land. But abundance produces surpluses. To reduce them, the department pays farmers not to cultivate some of their land. On the land they do cultivate, white southern farmers need less labor each year. On the land they take out of production, they need almost none.” For the large farmers and urban consumers these “policies have been beneficial,” Beardwood writes. But what of the rural poor? “So far, government and business have focused their problem-solv¬ ing powers on urban problems, and blinkered themselves to rural ones,” Beardwood concludes. “But every additional migrant is another burden to the cities, and the urban crisis will not be cured, or even arrested, until the South becomes more attractive to its black population than the urban North. The slums are in large part a result of the malaise of the rural and smalltown South; the violence in north¬ ern streets is a product of frustrations born in the southern fields.” It is merely necessary to substitute brown for black, and the South¬ west for the South, to depict the migrations and the miseries of the Chicanos in the barrios of Los Angeles, Phoenix, or El Paso. The vanishing farms have been helped into oblivion by the Census Bureau. In the mid-1950’s the statisticians eliminated hundreds of thousands of farms, and thus Department of Agriculture services to them, by moving a decimal point. Farms of less than ten acres were declared not to be farms any more, and were not counted. Tens of thousands of the Hispano farmers in New Mexico, and throughout the

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Southwestern colonias, with their garden plots and small pastures, were thereby rendered nonexistent. Alex Mercure is neither infuriated nor dismayed by the plight of these villagers. “The villagers are stubborn people,” he says. “So am I.” He was born into this troubled world. “I come from a rural village,” he says. Lumberton, the mountain community where his family lives, is in the midst of the old Spanish land-grant country. The Jicarilla Apache Reservation is nearby. “I grew up with Apache boys,” he says. The strength of these Apaches is in his patience. When he became a schoolteacher he stayed near his village, teach¬ ing in Chama, a lumber town in the mountains. Even when he went to the university to study business administration and economics he kept close to the way of the villagers. “I was even a local bartender,” he says. “Now I can go into any village and the people will say, ‘You come from Lumberton. You are one of us.’ A man has to begin with himself. He has to know himself. He has to know where he comes from and know who he is.” Mercure lives in the suburbs of North Albuquerque now, in the farthest-out community he could find without leaving the city. “I got as near to the farms as I could.” Along the wall of his driveway he grows rows of corn, and by the patio behind his suburban home there are patches of strawberries. On the wire fence that separates his lawn from the irrigation ditch, he has planted grapevines. The village has not left him, though he has left the village. His philosophy is still that of a villager: Like an old man the earth may grow tired. Unlike an old man the earth cannot die. In the spring every seed is an act of resurrection. Men may erode, cut up, fence in, sell, and disfigure the earth. But the earth will outlive them. This is his belief. “Our allegiance is to the land. The villager couldn’t care less about politics in the United States, or even Mexico. He cares about his land. Sometimes people will ask me why the villager doesn’t move. There is nothing in the village, they say. There are no jobs. That may be so. But it is our homeland. It is the land we were born on, and where we have lived for hundreds of years.”

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He tells the story of a man from the village of Portales. The man was asked if he would like to relocate to Albuquerque, where there were jobs, since there were no jobs in Portales. His way would be paid. The man said, “I have been to Albuquerque.” He thought about it for a while longer, then he added, “I would rather live in Portales than work in Albuquerque.” The man from Portales is not alone. A national opinion poll has shown that the majority of people who work in the cities would prefer to live in the country—if there was work. Urban living was the prefer¬ ence of a small minority. Irving Kristol, citing this poll in a critique of urban “myths,” feels that it indicates that rural life is not merely an idyllic memory; it is a living reality in the minds of most city dwellers. The “myths” of urban utopias are tenuous, Kristol writes in the New York Times; for the better the job the urbanite has, the farther away from the city he tends to live. The exodus to the cities has been slowing down in the last few years, Mercure believes In the most recent statistics of the Census Bureau this estimate is affirmed; the “urban boom” has begun to level off, the New York Times reports, and fewer rural immigrants are on the roads. At the height of the trek to the cities, in the 1960’s, more than 30 per cent of the people still lived in the rural areas. That population is “becoming more stable,” Mercure says, “and the people are not mov¬ ing from the villages as eagerly as they once did. They are returning to their villages more often. I think more would return if we had village industries. Jobs! “Life in the villages may be a resource for the entire country,” Mercure says. “Cybernetics and the computer revolution may soon mean that most workers won’t have anything to do. Then we will be in a real crisis. We may be in it already. We, in the villages, may then have to teach the country how to live in leisure. Riots in the cities may be a symptom of this age of cybernetics. The ghetto people who have ‘nothing’ to do, who have no jobs, are taught to feel ashamed and useless, to feel guilty. So they try to assert their manhood, to do something, anything. They riot. It’s this neurotic idea city people have that ‘doing nothing’ is somehow a crime. In the villages we know how to ‘do nothing.’ To live at a leisurely

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pace. To enjoy life. No one has to teach the villager how to live in the age of cybernetics. He is ready, willing, and able. He is not neurotic about ‘doing nothing.’ That’s one of the strengths of the village, and one of the reasons the village has endured. So, if the villages disappear our nation may lose its most precious resource—the solution to its urban problems. “The villages had better be rebuilt,” Mercure says, with matter-offact severity. “Where else can urban man go to find peace of mind?” Fecundo Valdez has an equally disregarded rural view of urban crisis: “The root of the riots, ghetto poverty, and crime is the decline of rural life. And that’s something all these Presidential Commissions on urban problems just ignore. Unless something is done at the roots it’s just going to get worse and worse. I think it’s high time that a serious attempt is made to halt the growth, break up and decentralize our industrial cities. “If we wish to save our cities, we will have to save the villages,” Valdez says. “But who will do that?” In the village of Penasco, high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, wedged in between the 13,102-foot peak of Truchas Mountain and the 11,947-foot Cerro Vista, the farmers no longer bemoan the “doom” of their village. They are too busy sowing seeds. The farmers of Penasco have formed a Vegetable Cooperative. In the past these farmers were too poor to buy tractors, and their plots of land were too small to be profitably farmed in an era of supermarket farming. Every year the families left the village to seek work in the cities. Now they farm cooperatively to compete with the factory farms and save their village. “We don’t say, Wipe out the fences. Instead we say, Let’s join hands, cooperate, and work together to make it feasible to farm the area. Instead of buying forty tractors, we’ll buy four, and all forty farmers can use them,” says Alex Mercure, who helped organize the Penasco Vegetable Cooperative, with the aid of help. He foresees a time when the poor farmers’ farms, whose meager harvests bring $25 to $50 an acre, will increase their harvests to $250 to $1,000 an acre. “These farmers could earn $4,500 a year.” Across the high mountains, in the village of Tierra Amarilla, where

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the men of Tijerina had come with their rifles two summers before, the farmers are building their own agricultural cooperative. They have laid down their rifles and have taken up their plows. In the spring of 1969 there were several meetings in the mountain village. The winds of March had not blown away the snow and frost when the farmers began to gather to talk once more of Zapata’s dreamed-of “La tierra le pertence al hombre que trabaja, con sus propias manos”—“The land belongs to those who work it, with their own hands.” Couldn’t they reclaim their land? Some of the farmers were skeptical. How could they, who had nothing, finance a cooperative? A few thought the cooperative would fail. “It is a mistake to give our sweat to a dream that will evaporate,” one man said. They had no money. A farmer offered his tractor. One villager donated his molino (a grinding mill for flour and cornmeal). Still another gave “a squealing pig.” Acre by acre the farmers of Tierra Amarilla gathered their land together, until they had offered two hundred “well-rested” acres to begin their cooperative with. If they cooperated, one village could help another, said young Pedro Archuleta, a leader of the Comancheros del Norte. Velarde, a nearby village, had lost all its fruit the year before. The apples, pears, and peaches had “dried up” on the trees, because the market prices were so low the farmers let the fruit rot. “We could trade beans, potatoes, and pumpkins for the fruit of the Velarde people,” Archuleta ex¬ plained, if the villages would cooperate. “That way, we could have both vegetables and fruits.” In the villages of Coyote and Las Vegas, and the cities of Espahola and Albuquerque, the women put up “donation boxes” to gather food for the cooperative farmers. Every week they collected canned goods and dried meat so that the workers in the fields would have something to eat during the long summer, before the harvest was gathered. “Our ancestors could make it pretty well; then we can now,” de¬ clared a village woman, Senora Juan Martinez. A woman in the village of San Cristobal, the dark and intense Enriqueta Longeaux de Vasquez, who is a voice of the cooperative movement, wrote in El Grito del Norte (“The Cry of The North”):

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“Land is a beautiful part of man’s relationship to nature. I see land as something that belongs to everyone. Land is like air and life. It is part of each and every one of us.” “The gringo doesn’t understand the way we feel about the land,” the villagers’ newspaper editorialized. “He uses the land to make money from. The land for us is not to make money. Nor is the water or the trees. 'Eliosson deDios’ These are of God! He gave them to us to feed our families with, and not to make a lot of money. “Our people in Tierra Amarilla are going to revive the old traditions of working together to feed our people, because this is the revolution, also,” wrote El Grito del Norte. “What good is it to fight for the land when our children grow up without food? Without a culture? Our children belong to the tomorrow when our revolution will bear fruit.” And so the farmers voted to set up their “cooperativa agricola del pueblo de tierra amarilla.” They issued a proclamation: “We are going to work together this summer to grow such crops as beans, potatoes, wheat to grind for flour, onions, garlic, and squash: just to name a few vegetables. We are going to work together so our children will not go hungry next winter. Our people are hungry and have to practically beg for food from the government. We beg the same government which took our land, or supported those who took it. We don’t want to beg any more. We want to grow the food we need, so we don’t have to go on welfare, or to the store which robs us in credit charges. We will store the food we grow and next winter give it to those of our people who helped grow it and to those who are hungry.” As the summer approached the call went out to the mountain vil¬ lages: “The Tierra Amarilla Co-op needs volunteers. Come work with your brothers and sisters. Work! So that people may eat. Work! For unity and power. Work! To be independent of the bloodsuckers.” In El Grito del Norte the beautiful Enriqueta Longeaux de Vasquez wrote: “Let’s go back to being more self-sufficient. Why do we have to support Mr. Safeway, whoever or wherever he may be? Let’s work the land. Then the land will come back to the people and it will belong to those who plant the seeds, water the fields and gather the crops.” The defiant slogan of the farmers, in honor of the hero of the Cuban

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revolution, had been rewritten. Once it had read: “Che Is Alive and Hiding in Tierra Amarilla.” Now it had been changed to: CHE

is

ALIVE

AND FARMING IN TIERRA AMARILLA!

PART TWO

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N.

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VIII

La Junta

It is a long, hot summer afternoon. Four young men from the poorest barrios of East Los Angeles lounge about beneath the lazy palm trees. In the suburban house of shabby elegance, mocked by once-gracious lawns and broken garden urns, the young men of the streets eat cheese sandwiches and drink beer and philosophize about bygone Aztec king¬ doms and utopias of brown power and poetry they have liked and the police who have beaten them up. Summer days inspire dreams. And these “young toughs,” as the police call them, are romantic and wist¬ ful. Who are these young dreamers? They are the Chicanos of La Junta. All summer the Los Angeles Police Department has feared trouble in the barrio from these youths. “The placas [police] have treated us like ;pendejos’ [literally, ‘pubic hairs’],” the Chicanos say, “because they do not understand us.” These young men are rebels, but are philosophical about their rebellion. Jose: “If you have a rebellion you have to have something to rebel against. So you may become racist. Stone racist. Is ‘brown power racist? No, ‘brown power’ is cultural. So it doesn’t have to become racist.” Hector: “I wonder. Why do militants create a lot of alienation in their communities?”

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Jose: “Man, we’re not rebelling. We’re building something. We’re trying to create less alienation and more community unity. A man without knowledge of his people is like a tree without a root. What we’re trying to do is get people this cultural consciousness. Brown power is to know your culture.” Roberto: “I agree with him. Brown power has to be different from black power because we are not black.” Hector: “I don’t agree with that. You ask a black man. What is black power? He’s going to tell you, well, black power is like the black man being able to take over his institutions, running his own thing. It’s black institutions run by black people for the betterment of black people. That’s what he’ll tell you. You know, basically, we want that.” Jose: “I think we have to go farther than that! Brown power has to be our cultural heritage. So we can get those values that were inherent in the Indians of ancient Mexico. And we can take those same values and same culture and use it in our lives and our movement. The way an Indian would relate to his family, to his tribe; the pride he had in his Indian nation. Brown power is first of all nationalism. But it isn’t nationalism that we have to learn from reading what some intellectual says, like black people do. This is nationalism that we know existed among our people thousands of years ago. It was true then, today, and it will be true a hundred years from now.” Hector: “Our people have been saying brown power for hundreds of years—only we have been saying it in Spanish.” Chuck: “Like before anything ever started, we used to get together, some dudes where I live at, we used to drink and all that, and we used to be talking before black power, before they had the riots and every¬ thing. Viva La Raza! and Chicano power! and Brown Power!—about things like that. So if you ask how come we copy the black people? It’s just we didn’t come on until later on. We didn’t do all kinds of demonstrations. But we always had it. We always said it. Among ourselves.” Once these young men were Brown Berets and wore the defiant caps with the insignia of the Holy Cross and two crossed rifles. “The brown beret was chosen because it is a symbol of the love and pride we have in our race, and in the color of our skin,” the manifesto of

Villagers from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico come to Washington, D.C., on the Poor People’s March, in 1968. After a century, the discontent, poverty, and repression in Hispano villages erupt in na¬ tional headlines. Photo by George Ballis

Reies Lopez Tijerina, prophet of the land-grant movement and a tor¬ rential orator; his Alianza Federal de los Pueblos Libres (Federal Alli¬ ance of Free City-States) leads a legalistic and religious rebellion, aimed at regaining the lost lands of the original settlers of the Southwest. Photo by George Ballis

In the village of Antonchico, Tijerina is greeted by Hispano farmers and ranchers. Unlike urban political movements, his cause—La Causa—arises in seeming spontaneity out of the family groups, religious ties, and ancestral memory of village life. Photo by Stan Steiner

The cross of Christ and the cross of the Electric Company symbolize the changed life of the rural village, side by side, on the crossroads leading to the Antonchico bridge, where, inT541, Coronado crossed the Pecos River. Don Juan de Onate, Billy the Kid, and Reies Tijerina also passed this way. Photo by Stan Steiner

Where the cultures meet, American-Spanish-Chinese food results. In the uranium-mining town of Grants, New Mexico, the Uranium Cafe serves tortillas as a side dish to chop suey. Photo by Stan Steiner

An old wooden carreta abandoned in the trash beside a gas station, near Socorro, New Mexico; the supply trains of the conquistadors were made up of such oxen-drawn carretas during the Conquest, four hundred years ago. Photo by Stan Steiner

Under a portrait of Benito Juarez, the Indian who became President of Mexico, an old farm worker in the Lower Rio Grande of Texas ponders the degradation of La Raza; his ancestors established the Republic of the Rio Grande a few generations ago and liberated the region from Texas. Photo by George Ballis

In the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, dozens of poor colonias, like this, have no water, no sewers, no electricity, no city services, and a stand¬ ard of living that is “lower than Mississippi’s.” Photo by George Ballis

A farmer of the Cooperativa Agricola del Pueblo de Tierra Amarilla (Agri¬ cultural Cooperative of Tierra Amarilla) plows the several hundred acres, fallow for twenty years, that were donated by local villages to their own communal farming project, “che is alive and farming in tierra ama¬ rilla,” says their poster. Photo by Maria Varela

Mrs. Gregorita Aguilar, president of Tierra Amarilla’s Cooperativa Agri¬ cola, feeds baby goats from Coca-Cola bottles. All the animals in the village cooperative, where a few years ago Tijerina led his raid on the county court¬ house, have been donated by local villagers. Photo by Maria Varela

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the youth group declares. A barrio “Self-Defense” unit in the begin¬ ning, it was established “to keep a watchful eye” on the police and to protect the rights of Chicano youth “by all means necessary.” In their pockets the Brown Berets carry “calling cards” with the motto “To Serve, Observe, Protect,” and the message at the bottom, “You Have Just Been Helped By,” with space for the bearer’s name. Newspapers have compared the Brown Berets to “a Mexican imita¬ tion of the Black Panthers.” In a national magazine the youth group was described as a “highly disciplined” and “paramilitary organiza¬ tion.” “We have information that they are receiving semimilitary training,” an intelligence officer of the Los Angeles Sheriff s Depart¬ ment was quoted as saying. He talked of “bayonet drills.” One latterday dime novel forecast a “Brown Beret Revolution,” with the fearful words, “the revolution is on,” because the manifesto of the Brown Berets asserts their right to bear arms: “We demand the right to keep and bear arms to defend our communities against racist police as guaranteed under the Second Amendment of the United States Con¬ stitution.” These young men have left the Brown Berets. “It is not enough to rebel,” one says. They are searching for something more lasting, to build something new. Roberto: “I don’t really know what brown power is. To me it’s a new feeling I have.” Hector: “Brown power means liberation to me. I don’t want to be outnumbered by Anglos ten to one. I don’t want to conform to what they want. Some little old lady in Pasadena is figuring out right now what us wetbacks will be doing next week. What freeway is going to run through my home. I don’t go for that. I want to determine what is right for me.” Roberto: “It’s not a racial thing.” Jose: “You see, we have some black Mexicans. We have some Mexicans with blue eyes and blond hair and white skin. He’s a surfer, you would think. He’s not. He’s a Mexican. He can take it any way he wants. The blacks can’t do that because their color is so obvious no matter what they do. What I’m saying is that brown power is not a black power sort of thing. Even though we are in the same condition,

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like brothers, we are not the same. I mean this is our motherland.” Hector: “You are using the white people’s words. English, you see. English is a racist language. That’s why they sound the same—brown power, black power. In Spanish we don’t say a color. We say, the power of the people—La Raza.” Jose: “I grew up in San Diego. Well, I used to think I was a good citizen. They say, you be a good citizen and you help your Uncle Sam. So I volunteered. I wanted to be the best, so I volunteered for the paratroopers.” Hector: “Man, he asked what brown power is and you’re talking about the paratroopers.” Jose: “Brown power! That’s me!” In his boyhood Jose was a paratrooper in Vietnam. He became the “Field Marshal” and elder statesman of the Brown Berets; a thought¬ ful, toughly philosophical young man of poetic words and a fragile sadness. Hector, with his perpetual dark glasses, talks tougher. He is preparing for college, training himself in intellectual self-defense. Car¬ los, called Chuck, is sullen and silent. When he talks his thoughts are flat and matter-of-fact, and he does not give himself away. Roberto, the youngest, talks the toughest, but he has a cherubic eye and he shyly whispers that he is a poet. (The poet laureate of the La Junta!) “Man, don’t mention our names,” says the former “Field Marshal” Jose. He feels that the Los Angeles Police Department is trying to harass and arrest the Brown Berets and to destroy their group. The young men agree; no real names. Jose: “I’m nervous. Man, I don’t know what I’m saying. The thing is I wanted to be a good citizen. Later on after I finished trade school I found out there’s something wrong with me. I’m brown! So I started saying, the devil with these people. I’m brown, fine! I don’t melt into this big pot, this melting pot you call ‘America.’ You know, oil and water don’t mix. So I have to float to the top, where I came from, to the top of the pot.” Hector: “We’re not in the melting pot sort of thing. Chicanos don’t melt.” Jose: “In this country it’s real hard. If you want decent bread you got to go to college. So you get a job for the government. So I have

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this poor Chicano in front of me and I have to send him to jail for stealing. Hell, the white man stole this whole continent, but white people never think of that. Did the white man ever get punished? No! He got rich. But my duty as a good citizen is to nail my brother! My brother! Why my brother?” Hector: “There’s a lot of Mexicans that are identifying with the Anglo. But the Anglo don’t really accept them. In most cases they look down on them too.” Roberto: “So we are like the man with a sword in his chest and nowhere to step back. We are pinned against the wall.” It began in the office of the mayor of Los Angeles. . . . The Mayor’s Advisory Youth Council had just selected an “out¬ standing high school student” and “exemplary young man” as its chairman for 1966—David Sanchez; a boy of sixteen. Los Angeles’ Mayor Samuel Yorty welcomed and congratulated the young man personally and gave him a gavel. One of David Sanchez’s projects was the Young Citizens for Com¬ munity Action. “A bunch of nice kids,” Eliezer Risco, the editor of La Raza, says, “that began reading about community issues and began setting up community projects, like taking kids to camp, or going to Delano and raising food for the farm workers. At one point they decided to have a coffeehouse.” The hope of the coffeehouse, says a Youth Conference Report of the University of California, was simply to attract teen-agers “and give them something to do instead of just walking the streets and hanging around street corners and smoking pot or indulging in what we call ‘the grapes of wrath.’ ” But, Risco relates, “the sheriff decided [the coffeehouse] was a bad place, because the kids drew a picket line in front of the sheriffs station where there had been a case of police brutality. So they [the police] went at it—every night, every night, every night. They would shine their lights into the coffeehouse, they would come in and pick up people for selling coffee without a license; the band that was playing there for nothing would be given a ticket for entertaining without a license, and anybody under eighteen would be picked up and held for six hours before they would release them, and [they would] tell the parents not to allow the kids to go there because they were Commu-

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nists, they were dope pushers, they were addicts.” David Sanchez, bitter and bewildered, tells what happened to him: “I was jumped by the fuzz. They had me at the jail for some minor kid thing and I didn’t want to get booked. I said I hadn’t done anything and I didn’t want to sign. One cop got me in a judo hold and another came up behind me from the back and knocked me flat. When I woke up they were booking me. So I began to change my mind about things. I began to see something was wrong with America. Things were no longer Stars and Stripes. We formed the Brown Berets, and one of our main jobs is to keep an eye on the cops.” The chairman of the Mayor’s Youth Advisory Council, David San¬ chez, became the Prime Minister of the Brown Berets. “Who orga¬ nized them? The police organized them,” Risco says. Hector says, “I don’t know what’s wrong with white people.” Jose replies, “Man, the name of the game is racism. The white man is a racist. It’s a colorful country.” Hector: “If people are racist, then something made them racist. So we get into the thing: why do we have racism? Mostly everybody says it’s economics. Who brought the slaves here? In Mexico they enslaved the Indians purely for economic reasons, to get gold out of the mines. It’s greediness that created racism.” Jose: “If you figure out how the West was won, it was just that. Racism is the democratic tradition.” Hector: “In my mind, this country was built on violence, built on blood. Like the way it’s being done in Vietnam, it’s the same thing that’s always been done here to the people—black or brown. As a matter of fact, wasn’t the Cuban revolution fought against the same owners of the same farms that now we’re fighting in the San Joaquin Valley?” Jose: “You say, Why is the world turning bad on me? The world is sick and tired of being good citizens. The world wants to eat, that’s all.” Hector: “Sure. I believe there will be armed conflict in this country between the races.” Jose: “There’s going to be armed conflict. But we won’t start nothing like that. We would be wiped out. We ain’t that crazy, man.”

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Hector: “I hear people talk about violent overthrow of the govern¬ ment. And setting up a new system. But the way I feel things are changing. Very fast. So whether it’s violent or nonviolent there is going to be something new to replace the old.” Chuck: “Violence is violence.” Hector: “You don’t have to be an intellectual to see it like that, man.” Jose: “It may not have to go to violence. Say we set up cultural nationalism right now. It becomes part of our lives. We get certain values we can believe in. We get a new system and new institutions. And we have a new country, see.” Now that they have formed La Junta, it is with a sad ceremony that the youths hang up their brown berets. They have a nostalgia for their days as street fighters, the vato locos of the barrios. “The vato loco has truly been at the forefront of the Chicano Revolution, but without realizing it,” they say. Vato Loco is untranslatable, meaning something like “crazy mixed-up kids,” but said affectionately. “The vatos have been the victims of the most jacked-up schools, shitty jobs, and messed-up chantes. We have no choice of making decisions that affect our lives. The only way we could express our pride in La Raza was putting our placas [insignia, or graffiti] on walls, buses, and other places. Today the placas still go up on walls, but we are also learning other ways,” says the La Junta manifesto. La Junta is one of the “other ways.” It is “a group of vatos from different barrios” who “know who is their real enemy.” Hector: “People say the country is in a revolution. We’ve always been in a revolution. If burning a television store is revolution, what is it when the Ku Klux Klan burns a church?” Jose: “Well, different people have different interpretations of what revolution means. John F. Kennedy, you know, talked about his American revolution. Man, his revolution wasn’t ours.” Hector: “On our continent the white people are a minority. And your minority just happens to control the rest of us brown people. That’s what we’re fighting. Just saying self-determination isn’t enough any more. See, we’ll never have self-determination in this country as long as the Man runs his electricity into our homes, as long as he sells

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us his cars, as long as we’re his boys. Well, you know what I’m getting at.” Jose: “I’m fighting as the Indian fought—for motherland.” Roberto: “If our white brothers won’t accept us we’ll go back to our ancestors. Our brown brothers.” Jose: “We’re going back to our old culture. Now we don’t want none of this Hispano stuff no more. The Spanish were murderers. They murdered our ancestors. It’s not that we don’t want to be white. We know we are part white and part Indian. It’s just we have made up our minds who we want to be.” Hector: “One thing we want our people to see is America isn’t a country. The United States is a country. But America is a continent. A brown continent.” Jose: “This is motherland. God put the brown man on this contin¬ ent. Just like God put the black man on his continent, he put the white man on his continent, he put the Asian man on his continent. But this is motherland. I come from the part of motherland that is called Mexico—the part, it’s not a country. I don’t see Mexico no more as a country. I’m not talking about Mexico. I’m not talking about the United States. Now it’s all just motherland to me.” Hector: “It’s hard to understand what we’re saying. We haven’t discussed it yet, so maybe we better not talk about it.” Jose: “Now, in this country, we get eaten all the time by the wolf. All of a sudden the wolf figures out he can’t eat you no more, so he comes dressed as a fox. But it was the white man that put the fox in it. We didn’t have foxes before the white men came.” Hector: “Once there was no poverty. There was no poverty upon another man. I read the Indians of Mexico, they worked just forty-five days out of the year. It was the perfect society to them. The wheel was invented here, you know. The principle of the wheel. Why didn’t they use the wheel? Because they didn’t want to go no place. Everybody was happy. But no! The white man has to come along with his ‘progress. Jose: “Where Geronimo used to hide out, that’s where they ex¬ ploded the A-bomb. It is ironical.” Chuck: “Man, that’s ‘progress.’ ” 5 55

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Jose: “What are we going to do? What are we going to set up? I think we have to study what our ancestors had. So far we haven’t studied that, because we no longer have our real, true culture, because we were made slaves and indoctrinated with a bunch of bull. If we say we’re studying what our ancestors did, they start calling us Communist! You know, everything belonged to the tribe, you know, communal.” Hector: “The witch doctor belonged to the tribe. So you had social¬ ized medicine.” Jose: “I think we have to go back to what we had before. That doesn’t mean we’re going to walk around barefoot, half-naked, in Los Angeles. It’s just that things that existed then can exist now. The family ties. The tribal ties. Everybody thinking they’re part of the tribe and everybody working for the betterment of the tribe.That’s what Chavez is doing in the fields. That’s what Tijerina is doing in the villages. That’s what we can do, the same thing, in Los Angeles, in our communities. That’s what no white man can do for us because the Man don’t know where that’s at.” The young men have come from the public library with arms full of books. In the summer afternoon they sit and read aloud to each other from the poetry of the Aztecs, Mexican history, and the culture of La Raza. “We are going back to our beginnings,” Jose says, “so we know where we will go in the future.” One youth comes upon the words of Jaurez. He reads the passage loudly, with the excitement of discovery. His black eyes are luminous. These men of La Junta have dark, sensitive, moody faces and gentle voices. If humanists can rise from the ghetto streets these barrio youths are the living images of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “scholars of the gutter.” Their manifesto says: It is the purpose of La Junta to spread cultural consciousness among our people by setting up Chicano Libraries in the barrios which will carry books dealing with the History, Heritage and Culture of La Raza; by setting up educational classes; by setting up programs of community involvement; by working in the creative arts such as the Teatro Chicano, Music, Poetry, Painting and Film. . . . We will stress pride in our people not only by teaching and learning our history, but by showing the great contributions of La Raza to civilization. In working towards our goals we will conduct

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ourselves and La Junta in a free and democratic manner, in keeping with the great traditions of the Americas.

In the streets nearby the police cars patrol, looking for trouble.

IX

Exodus

Good-bye, my beloved land, Now I am going away. I go to the United States Where I intend to work. For I am not to blame, If I abandon my land; Poverty is to blame, That holds us in misery.

He comes an exile, from himself; a refugee, a wanderer, a pilgrim, a seeker. But at the border he is merely an alien, a wetback, another a

“dirty Mexican.” In the old corrido, “An Emigrant’s Farewell,” the Mexican sings as he goes into exodus: Good-bye, my beloved land, I bear you in my heart.

On any of the bridges over the Rio Grande, for 2 cents or 5 cents, anyone can walk across. The river is so shallow much of the year that in many places you can wade through the water without getting your

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back wet. “Wetback” is an unnecessary insult; for hundreds of miles there is no river at all. Like the wild steers and jackrabbits, anyone may cross the legal line in the sand who dares brave the deserts and the jeeps of the Border Patrol. And that, too, was unnecessary a generation or two ago, when there was not even a fence on the border line. The rites of passage to exodus have never been physically difficult, but they are “humiliating.” It is a “process where a human being is asking permission to enter the home of another,” Antonio Gomez, a young Chicano in East Los Angeles, writes in Con Safos: Reflections of Life in the Barrio. “The latter thinks over this request very care¬ fully. He asks for formal proof of his neighbor’s character and sends him for a medical examination, to rule out the possibility of con¬ taminating his household.” Old and young braceros were medically examined for “tuberculosis, venereal disease and infestation of lice.” It was an insult to a man’s dignity. The Mexican, more than most wanderers, likely traveled with his entire family, and because of this he was especially sensitive. He is not a man to be shamed before his wife and children. “What was I? An animal?” are the words that still enrage the mem¬ ory of so many who crossed over. How much easier it is to walk across the International Bridge and not go back. To cross the water on the raft of a coyote at night, hiding from the Border Patrol, is preferable to being numbered and ques¬ tioned. At least, that takes some courage. To bribe an official and defy the customs is better still, for that way a man may face some of the perils to his manhood that ennoble the journey, yet he may laugh at the governments. To laugh at the gobierno is after all a poor man’s luxury. I go sad and heavy-hearted To suffer and endure; My Mother of Guadalupe Ay, grant my safe return.

Crossing the border line is legally traumatic and inhuman. “Every poor Mexican is familiar with [his] powerful neighbor, and it is the

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dream of many to emigrate to the ‘land of opportunity,’ ” writes An¬ tonio Gomez. “However, the dream of many is the reality of few, for it is no easy task to enter the United States legally.” The purgatory of the emigrant is not merely one of bureaucracy, red tape, fees, quotas, and petty bribes. He knows that all too well from Mexico. It is more “humiliating” that he must do all this to cross an all-butnonexistent border, into a land that was settled by his forefathers. He goes to what he calls “conquered Mexico.” “Where is the border?” says Eduardo Perez, a community leader in East Los Angeles, who has been secretary of the State Committee of the Democratic Party of California. “There is no border to many of our people. There is no border in their hearts. It seems the same country, the same desert to them. There is only a border for our government officials. “For hundreds of years our ancestors lived in the Southwest,” Perez says. “This was conquered Mexico. It still is. History cannot just be wiped clean of blood.” “You are in Mexico!” Perez exclaims, lounging in his office in the Institute of Industrial Relations of the University of California, Los Angeles. “Sometimes I think, Is this the University of California, or the University of Northern Mexico?” “The journey to the United States for Mexicans, particularly to the Southwest, where most Mexican Americans live, is a trip to another part of ‘their’ country,” says Hector Abeyta, the director of Califor¬ nia’s Manpower Opportunities Project of the U.S. Department of Labor. “The Southwest was once Mexican. It retains language, cul¬ ture, and physical resemblances. The next-doorness of Mexico, the ease with which the border is crossed and recrossed, reinforced these resemblances; for there is the seemingly bottomless reservoir of poor from Mexico.” The emigrant knows. “To the Mexican American in the Southwest, this is his land and his roots are sunk deep in it,” says Maclovio Barraza, the president of the Council of Mexican American Unity and an officer of the United Steel Workers in the Southwest. “In many, if not most cases, he [the Mexican] preceded those who have exploited and are exploiting him.”

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It is the homeland of the Chicano. He is native to it. By his Spanish ancestry, before the English landed on Plymouth Rock, and by his Indian ancestry, before either England or Spain existed, the Southwest was his mother country. Now he looks around, and he knows that memory has become a myth. He sees only a trace of his ancestry in the history books, the land offices, or the traduced names of cities. This is his land, by ancestry; yet, he comes as an alien. In a day, in a year, how many millions of men, women, and children cross the border “in their hearts”? Who can say? It has been estimated that on an ordinary day more than 150,000 Mexicans “officially” come and go across the border. In an ordinary year, say 1964, there were estimated to be 67,200,000 border cross¬ ings, to and fro, by citizens of Mexico who checked through the few dozen customs stations. These impressive figures do not include the millions who crossed “unofficially.” Nor the Mexican Americans who are citizens of the United States. They do not include either “the first entry of immi¬ grants [or] agricultural contract workers.” They do not include “wet¬ backs,” those who simply do not bother to go through the customs stations on the desert-and-river border that stretches for 1,600 miles across half a continent. It was estimated by the Commissioner General of Immigration, in 1911, that the discrepancy between “unofficial” and “official” immi¬ grants from Mexico was ten or twenty to one. During the first decade of the century the Annual Report of the Commissioner General re¬ ported that while 24,000 Mexican immigrants were “officially” noted in the years 1900 to 1910 (with inevitable inaccuracy another estimate was 49,000), the “unofficial” count was perhaps 500,000. The Com¬ missioner wrote that “at least” 50,000 were arriving in “normal years,” but these uncounted Mexicans were dismissed as “nonstatistical” aliens. Years before that all Mexicans were “nonstatistical.” In the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, the Immigration “Reports” specifically excluded “citizens of British North America and Mexico coming direct therefrom by sea or rail.” The Mexican was not yet an “alien,” wrote a contemporary writer. The “nonstatistical”

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Mexicans were even then thought to number half a million. Later, these “nonstatistical” Mexicans increased. In the years from 1950 to 1960 the exodus of Mexicans who “officially” crossed the border as immigrants numbered 293,469. Yet during that same decade 4,078,655 Mexicans, who had apparently immigrated “unofficially,” were deported. Though “official” immigration averaged 30,000 a year, in two years—1953 and 1954—1,910,282 men, women, and children were deported to Mexico. These masses of immigrants do not include the braceros, 3,485,786 in that decade. Braceros are laborers contracted for work in the fields. Statistically these men and women are not aliens, even though they are brought across the border outside of the quotas. But their passage is not illegal. The agreements between the United States and Mexican governments render them legal—if “nonstatistical.” Every year thou¬ sands of braceros simply disappeared. “The Immigration Service had not the facilities to keep count of this hegira,” lamented the Immigration Service in the: 1930’s. It never has had the appropriation nor the inclinations to do so, says Dr. Ernesto Galarza, who has devoted a lifetime of scholarship to attempting a cultural count of the exodus; the Mexican and United States govern¬ ments have agreements regulating the flow of everything from glass beads to water, says Dr. Galarza, “but never, as far as I know, with regard to the flow of working men, women and children.” “One of the major mass movements of people in the western hemi¬ sphere,” Dr. Galarza has written of these great migrations of the poor that have not yet ended. Like the Pharaohs of Egypt the lesser officials have neither the will nor the power to halt the exodus. Or even to count it. “It is perhaps the greatest peacetime invasion complacently suffered by a country under open, flagrant, contemptuous violation of its laws,” complained the overwhelmed Assistant Commissioner of Immigration, Willard F. Kelley, who had charge of the Border Patrol. Why, then, the legal quiescence? It is odd that the quotas of immi¬ gration, meticulously contrived by Congress and chastely enforced by customs at all ports of entry, should be so oblivious of millions of Mexicans. “Migrations unguided and unaided by any national or state

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policy,” the Bureau of Agricultural Economics in Washington, D.C., has termed it. In the years of 1953 and 1954, there was a wave of deportations. Under the shadow of the economic recession that befell the country after the Korean War, and influenced by the mood cast by the restric¬ tive McCarran-Walter Immigration Act of 1952—which has since been rewritten and liberalized—a Special Mobile Force of the Border Patrol was launched into the barrios as far north as Chicago and Spokane. It was named Operation Wetback. The barrios were terrified. People were confronted “at home, or in the street, or other public places”—even while at the movies—and arrested. If their papers were not in order, they were deported. Some with “long residence status in this country were apprehended and sent back to Mexico,” reports Dr. Leo Grebler in Mexican Immigration to the United States (UCLA Mexican American Study Project). One corrido laments: I could not run away, Not knowing the country.

In the years of 1953 and 1954 there were 1,910,282 deportations of Mexicans. Operation Wetback was a success. Yet in the very next year 380,091 Mexican aliens registered under the Alien Registration Law in the state of California alone. By 1959 there were 528,275. This, despite the fact that fewer than 200,000 Mexican aliens were legally admitted into the United States from 1956 to 1960. Operation Wetback was a failure. During the mass deportations Congress was cutting the appropria¬ tion for the Border Patrol. The Senators and Congressmen from the border states led the fight for the cuts. In disarming, if somewhat disingenuous, words, Willard F. Kelley, whose Border Patrol executed the deportations, sought to explain the non sequitur of immigration policy: “We do feel we have the authority to permit to remain in the United States aliens who are agricultural workers, whether they are here legally or not!” “Out of a total farm work force of 1.6 million in this country, illegals account for at least 20 per cent,” James D. Lorenz, an attorney for the

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California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), told the Senate subcom¬ mittee on Migratory Labor in August, 1969. Lorenz testified that the Border Patrol deported 151,705 Mexican aliens the previous year. He quoted Labor Department estimates that “at least one, probably two” illegal emigrants worked in the fields “for every one caught.” Growers knowingly employed these “illegals,” let them harvest the crops, then reported them to the Border Patrol so that they were arrested before they were paid their wages, Lorenz said. The Border Patrol “is running a revolving door, probably the most expensive travel agency in the world,” the attorney told the Senators. The exodus has had beneficial results for many. The reservoir of fearful, low-paid, non-union, and once-grateful Mexican laborers who helped build the Southwest have been largely the “nonstatistical aliens.” Keith Mets, the president of the Imperial Valley Farmers Association, said: “Every farmer from Brownsville [Texas] to San Diego [California] uses these people.” The hard-rock miners of the Southwest traditionally have been Mexicans. In Arizona there are copper pits where more than 90 per cent of the miners at the pit faces are Mexicans still. The railroads, too, have used La Raza. It was partially at the request of the railroads in World War II that the government inaugurated the bracero program and, in those years alone, employed more than 60,000 Mexican aliens. They told me dollars Lay about in heaps

“It is the poor who come,” says Luis Valdez, the director of El Teatro Campesino of the farm workers of California. “The poor and illiterate, not the rich and powerful. Where are they going? They come from the fields of Mexico and they are still in the fields here. And they still do not know where they are going. “They keep coming. Eighty thousand, one hundred thousand, a hundred and fifty thousand a year, they come across,” Valdez says. The cockroach, the cockroach, Can no longer walk

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“Migration is the failure of roots.” It is more, for migration is the seeking for roots as well, and to say “displaced men are ecological victims,” as Dr. Galarza does, is to tell but half of a man’s story and demean the rest. “Lay down the choice: move or die,” and some men will die. Those who “are able to break away, leaving a hostile world behind to face an uncertain one ahead,” as Dr. Galarza says in tribute, are courageous men, and their trek into the exodus is no less heroic because they are barefoot, ignoble, earthy, ill, and unschooled workers in the fields. “La Raza has a tradition of migrations,” Luis Valdez says, “starting from the legend of the founding of Mexico.” Huitzilopochtli, the sun and war god, prophesied that if the ancestors of the Aztecs would march south they would found a mighty kingdom. “In that march he prophesied that the children would age and the old would die, but their grandchildren would come to a great lake. In that lake they would find an eagle devouring a serpent, and on that spot they would begin to build a great nation. The nation was Aztec Mexico.” It is still the symbol of Mexico, the eagle devouring the serpent that is on the national flag. When the descendants of the Aztecs marched north again, to the fields of California, he says, the Farm Workers Union put that eagle on their flag. “We put our old history on wheels of jalopies,” says Valdez. “Cul¬ ture of the migrants! It is nothing but our Aztec heritage of migrations, mechanized.” In 1168, the year of Genghis Khan’s first birthday, the Aztecs set forth on their pilgrimages. The year was marked on the calendar of the People of the Sun with precision, for their exodus was a religious migration, led by the gojd of sun and war himself. Huitzilopochtli said to the people: “Verily, I shall lead you where you must go. You shall go only where you see me, the sun, and when you come to a land where it shall seem good to me that you stay, there I shall come down to earth, and shall you see me there.” In simple words, Go, follow the sun. The Mexican migrant still does just that. But he no longer is guided by the gods. An old migrants’ corrido says:

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Oh, land of the sun, I sigh for your sight— Now I am so distant I go without love— I go without life—

On their pilgrimage the Aztecs were tested by the gods. The offering of two bundles was made to the tribal elders, one bundle concealing a jewel and the other nothing but sticks. Whoever chose the bundle of sticks was judged by the gods to be wisest. The moral being: When on a pilgrimage through hundreds of miles of wilderness, jewels are useless. The legends of the exodus of the Aztecs are many. One tells of seven tribes that went in search of “the promised land” of their Sun God. Six tribes went directly to Anahuac, “The Land of the Ring,” that was in the Valley of Mexico City. But not the Aztecs. Like Indian Jews they wandered for generations. The biblical migrants even then, they journeyed from kingdom to kingdom, through war and ordeal, before they finally reached their second homeland, in 1216. When the priests saw this land they cried, “Now we have reached the promised land, now we have seen what comfort and rest has been bestowed on the Mexican people. Nothing more remains for us.” It was a land of dazzling whiteness, says one legend: white cypress, white willows, white frogs, white watersnakes. But there was no land like this in the Valley of Mexico. It is thought that the whiteness of the Aztec vision was a memory of their old homeland. The name Azteca is derived from the Nahuatl word Aztlan, mean¬ ing the “white land,” or “land of white reeds.” Knowing this, some scholars say the tribe migrated from the Sonora desert of northwestern Mexico, and some say they came from the white sands along the Rio Grande or Colorado Rivers. Francisco Javier Clavijero, who studied the origins of the Aztecs in the early 1700’s, thought the tribe may have come from north of the Colorado River, in the deserts of the Imperial Valley of California, or the deserts of Arizona—the “white land” of their name. He knew they came from the north. If this is so, “the promised land” of the exodus of the modern migrants is really the homeland of their ancestors, the Aztecs. Exodus

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is a homecoming, in the Bible. It is not the tragedy of the wanderings of the Hebrews in exile, but is a celebration of their return to the land their God “promised” them. Perhaps that, too, is the story of the Mexican migrants. “Many years before, the Aztecs had walked their own walk in search of a place to live,” writes Dr. Octavio Ignacio Romano, in El Grito: A Journal of Contemporary Mexican-American Thought. “Now the refugees of the Revolution were walking. They walked to the north, to another country. They too walked in search of a place to live. And this too was a long walk. “This is how the long walk began anew. Or was it that it had never stopped?” Dr. Romano writes. “We are all migrants,” says Luis Valdez. “We always have been.” So the corrido of the migrant laments in the endless refrain: To see myself alone Like a windblown leaf— I would like to cry, I would like to die, Because of grief.

“Good-bye Revolution—Hello Slum!” writes Dr. Romano.

X

The Man with the Guitar

It is four o’clock in the morning on the Mexican border. The lights of the Border Station flicker on the deserted streets. A truck parks in a dark alleyway. The driver lights a cigarette, and waits. Hundreds of people with small bundles move noiselessly past the yawning border guards. The driver spits contemptuously at the ragged ones. These are his human cargo. One by one the men and women crawl under the loose tarpaulin on the back of the truck. No one talks. When the truck is full the driver stomps out his cigarette and roars northward. He drives one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred miles without stopping, except for gas. The local city ordinances along the way are not gra¬ cious to truckloads of Mexicans. He knows the police will not stop him if he does not stop. Inside the truck there may be thirty or forty men and women. The stagnant air is nauseating. Even the breeze under the tarpaulin of sweetly sick desert dawn does not help. An old man may urinate in tension; his fear pollutes the crowded, stifling truck. “Are you sick?” someone says. “Yes,” the old man says. They nod. What is there to say when there is nothing they can do?

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Going to the fields, in every truck I have been in, there is a man who can sing. He may have a harmonica or he may have a guitar. It doesn’t matter. If he sings at that lonely hour he sings to himself. When I left Hermosillo My tears fell like rain, But the little red flower Consoled my pain. I am like a coyote Who eats poppies, and goes Trotting off sideways— Where? Nobody knows.

The migrants are put in windowless trucks and the doors are locked. Where they are going? They do not know. They do not all get there. In San Antonio one locked truck was abandoned on the highway in the summer of 1968. The men and women who were imprisoned inside—more than three dozen—cried out for hours until their lungs gave out, pounded on the steel walls that muffled their shrieks until their fists were bloodied. When help came, several had died. They had suffocated in the truck that was to deliver them to jobs in the fields. The brave men have died. Every good man passes. The shameless are left— Who eat corn mush.

The open, rumbling trucks of the coyotes and the old buses, aban¬ doned by the regular companies, are not all that bad. Like the village buses of ancient vintage in old Mexico they wheeze through the deserts of the Southwest. Every year one or two of these fail to make •

I

it across the railroad crossing, somewhere on a country road, and the campesinos are flung out, like chickens, to die beside the highway. One ordinary morning in the little town of Calexico, in the Imperial Valley of California, there are twenty-three trucks and old buses wait¬ ing for their human cargoes. In one hour, from 4:00 to 5:00 a.m.. Dr. Ben Yellen, a city councilman from nearby Brawley, using a hand counter, clocked those who crossed the border at that single customs station. He counted 1,404 campesinos, in that dim, predawn hour.

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“These are poor people,” says Dr. Yellen. “In Mexico the farm workers earn fifteen cents an hour, those who are lucky enough to get jobs. The corporations—Litton Industries, Fairchild Camera, Hughes Aircraft—who have factories south of the border pay their workers as little as two dollars a day. So naturally these poor people think that working for fifty cents an hour in the United States is paradise. It’s worth the suffering, they think.” And so they come, singing of sorrows and nostalgia. The exodus goes on. It is the same in every border town, on every morning, from Brownsville to Tijuana. “The most deprived classes of Chicanos are constantly replenished by new immigrants, both permanent and temporary, from Mexico,” says Hector Abeyta, the director of California’s Manpower Oppor¬ tunities Project of the U.S. Department of Labor. “Almost all of the immigrants are from the poorest people in that country, who come north in search of opportunity. “Mexican Americans have a higher proportion of foreign born than any other ethnic group in the United States,” Abeyta says. It is whispered in the barrios that tens of thousands of people are neither citizens nor legal residents of the United States. “They jump!” says Eduardo Perez, a community leader of East Los Angeles. “They disappear. They vanish into the barrios. They live like anyone. They don’t hide in this Disneyland of the U.S.A.,” says Perez. “They are bold.” The old corrido says: Who puts water in his wine Makes it thin and weak; Who never has known life Of living may not speak.

And yet the emigrant is fearful. The rites of passage across the border of legality are Kafka-like. One young man, a Chicano student at UCLA, says, “Kafka would be at home here. If Kafka had more macho [masculinity], more passion, he could be Mexican. He knew what he was writing about when he compared a man to a cockroach. ‘La Cucaracha’—that’s us.”

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“La Cucaracha” was the hymn of the Mexican Revolution, but the man with the guitar sings it differently. He is a cockroach. He is invisible. Not only the memory of his illegality, but the ever-present reality of deportation. It is officially guessed that as many as 40,000 Mexican citizens come to Los Angeles alone yearly. (The population of San Antonio is es¬ timated to increase by 50,000 every year.) One barrio leader of East Los Angeles says that he unofficially guesses the annual influx in that city may be 100,000. He is asked, Why, if this is so, is the population of the barrios not many millions? “The border is a two-way street,” he says. “Maybe 100,000 come; maybe 100,000 go.” Once he has crossed over, he is in jeopardy. He may be “cowed and thankful” for his family’s safe arrival. “After all, isn’t he, the Mexican immigrant, a guest, an ensimado, and an arrimado, a parasite?” writes Antonio Gomez in Con Safos: “Is it not unthinkable for a guest to complain about the lodgings and odd jobs that his host has given him? What voice does a guest have in operating the host’s household?” The migrant is ridiculed by the Chicanos. The young Los Angeleans sometimes refer to the newcomer contemptuously as a “TJ.” Literally the nickname means that he comes from Tijuana. Where he crosses the border does not really matter so much as his awkward manner, unfashionable dress, and servility. He is cowed by the affluence of the city and overwhelmed by the speed of the freeways. The poorest of the poor, the TJ has no choices. He must accept the lowest jobs, live in the worst barrios, suffer the insults of both Chicano and Anglo. He has only his family to help him. Life is precarious and work is scarce. An emigrant to the barrios has to know how to laugh at his dilemma. I'went to the border To see who knew me: And at eleven that night The police arrested me. They arrested me In the American style: As if 1 was a criminal With pistol in hand.

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He is jailed for “being a fighting cock,” the emigrant of the corrido laments. In his cell he is offered “a recipe of the House of Congress,” the warrant for his arrest. “Do you know why you’re in prison?” asks the judge. He doesn’t. The emigrant replies seriously, putting on a formal manner, “I don’t expect a temple or crystal palace.” But the judge is not amused; he sentences the emigrant to jail, and to himself the emigrant thinks, I have been arrested “because of my stupidity.” He laughs at himself. I come from Morelia Dreaming of the dollars, Bought shoes and a hat, Even put on trousers.

Hundreds and thousands of vaciladas, corridos, ballads, serenades, posadas, aires de la tierra, and popular tunes tell of the journey of the migrants and of living in the barrios. In the life of an “unlettered people,” words are music and history is sung. “Wherever you go, you shall go singing,” Huitzilopochtli, the war and sun god of the Aztecs, had commanded. It is still so. The odyssey of the migrants into the urban cities is rewritten by every man with a guitar. “Out of poverty, poetry; out of suffering, song,” is the old Mexican proverb. Songs are the true history of the migrations of La Raza.

Now I am confused. I am a shoemaker. But here I am a camel, With a pick and shovel. What good is my trade If machines are faster; When I make two shoes, They make one million. They told me the money Lay in the streets Like girls and theatres— A utopia of sweets.

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Laughter of the vacilada is cruel, yet not bitter. “It hurts. Like the old clown, we laugh on the outside and connive on the inside,” says Eduardo Perez The song of the vacilada is the song of irony; it has many meanings. It is the tale told by the corrido, set to music of a madrigal, with the moral of a hallucination. Damn the black clothes! And the scissors and thread! My sweetheart wears mourning! But I am not dead!

He is complex, the man with a guitar. He is the troubadour of the exodus. The corrido and vacilada are the Mexican spirituals of the barrios. And yet these songs are as different as the sunrise and the twilight. The corrido is a musical fiesta of barrio life and love and death, the newspaper of those who do not read, sung in the cantina and plaza by the village chronicler. Its melody is familiar to all, every verse is as rounded and predictable in form as a tortilla, and every line is rhymed. The vacilada is a blasphemy. It is the song of the refugees from the dying villages. Sung by the urban villagers, on the highways and in the barrios, its words have the mocking tone of a Mexican Bob Dylan, haunting and questing. Nothing of how a vacilada will end is known when the singer begins, except that it will end in a tragicomic way. It always does. Even death is mocked, not lamented. The singer twists the words any which way he wishes. The melody is unsettled and nervous, with lines that rhyme and lines that conflict. Strangely, the words of the corridos that the man with the guitar sings sound more and more like those of the vaciladas. The cactus is bare Where my fish was sweet; So worry no more About girls I meet.

Often the wanderer works for a season, pockets whatever he has saved in the fields, and goes home again, to his sorrow:

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My green tree has fallen Where my dove cooed; If I go home again, Will I find a blonde brood? The hut of adobe is gone Where my machete hung; Everything I owned Is buried in dung.

Like the troubadour of old he goes down the road not quite knowing where he is going. He knows only he has nowhere else to go. He goes singing. In the back of a truck or in a broken bus he rides with his family. He goes into the fields or into the cities. Wherever he goes he momen¬ tarily becomes a nonentity, one of the unknown and nameless ones who leave their identity behind and seek a new life. He is invisible. There is safety in not being seen, in the ghetto, in the barrio, where he is one of many in what seems a hostile and unfriendly society. He may sing to himself: Where am I to go? Where? The road is here. The road to the Gods. Well, who counts men here? Here where all lack a body? At the bottom of the sky?

XI

In the Barrios of the City of Angels and Seven Hells

The Urban Villages On the hills of the City of Our Lady of the Angels there are tiers of little houses, like the strings of villages on the sea coasts of Spain or Italy or Mexico. The houses are painted in dime-store shades of yellow and white and lavender and pink. In between the houses are fig trees, and cypress, and cedars, and old cars and palms rise like questioning fingers out of the flower beds of poverty in between freeways. The sky is blue as the Mediterranean, or gray as a dirty window when the smog does not stay downtown where it belongs. “Wonder at this scene of many-colored houses! The houses of our city make us, who are miserable, see light among the flowers and songs and see beauty. Where it gleams forth in fourfold rays, where the fragrant flowers bud, there five the Mexicans, the youth.” So a poet wrote of the capital of the Aztecs, hundreds of years ago. In the barrios of Los Angeles the modern descendants of the Aztecs have built a suburb of that ancient city. The metropolis is a paradox composed of oldest Mexico and the newest technological gadgetry in the United States.

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Signs of that paradox are on the walls of the barrios: “viva Kennedy!” “abajo dodgers!” “go, dodgers, go!” “el bazaar de Mexico”: a dry-goods store that sells workclothes and bikinis, “rppa usada”: the secondhand clothing store with a surfboard and a pair of water skis in the window, beside used brassieres, “vote for Rea¬ gan!” “gringo, go home!” “the joker’s den”: the hamburger joint with “fine MEXICAN food.” Tacos and Cokes, “tortilleria”: Wholesale and Retail, “join the u.s. marines.” “chicano power.” Old women in black mantillas and floral dresses from Sears buy bananas from an open fruit stall. Across the street, in Spanish, the sign in the real-estate office entices the old women: “Naturalization Pa¬ pers” and “Income Taxes Prepared.” Here is the religious store: Articulos Religiosos, Herbas. Candles to the Virgen de Guadalupe. Candles to the Infant of Prague. Can¬ dles to Christ. Candles to “Papa Julius.” And candles to a huge, ominous Indian chief in blood-red wax. Here is the secular shrine: the storefront mission of the Remedial Education and Cultural Opportunity for the Rurally Deprived (re¬

cord, let’s call it), where a Berlin cafe skit by Bertolt Brecht is adver¬ tised in Pachuco slang, underneath a plastic piriata made by the Sunset Years Club of retired farm workers. Here is the “Extermino La Cucaracha” sign in every drugstore window. In sunny California the cockroaches grow healthy and strong. Exterminating cockroaches is the main sport of the barrios’ hunters. Who remembers that “La Cucaracha” was the anthem of the Mexican Revolution? The barrios of Los Angeles are the third largest Mexican city in the world. Guadalajara and Mexico City alone have greater populations. No one knows for certain, but barrio leaders say that from 800,000 to 1,000,000 Mexicans live in Los Angeles. Either population is larger than the population of Washington, D.C., or Cleveland, Ohio. The people of La Raza in the city, by themselves, constitute one of the ten largest cities in the United States. Los Angeles is the capitol of La Raza. It is to the Mexicans what Boston has been to the Irish and New York City has been to the Jews.

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Many people are extremely poor. And yet there is a beauty in the barrios. Roses entwine the junked cars in the backyards, much as the tropical flowers cover the poorest Indian hut in Mexico. In one of the cities in the San Joaquin Valley, there is a Community Poverty Coun¬ cil that has a eucalyptus tree on its front lawn, a lemon tree at its back door, and roses blooming on the window sill of the “welfare lady’s” office, where the poor come for their alms. The poverty of a rural home is not visible from outside, especially when the home is in a city. Ever since the Aztecs built the City of Mexico the people of La Raza have been people of the cities. The conquistadors thought their city as magnificent as any in Europe. Bernal Diaz del Castillo, the chronicler of Cortes, wrote: “Some of the soldiers among us who have been in many parts of the world, in Constantinople and in Rome, said that so large a market place and so full of people and so well regulated and arranged, they had never beheld before.” And Spaniards, too, were of the city: “The civilization of Spain is an urban thing,” one historian says. “In America it is the one city that symbolizes the rule of Spain,” another writes. It is not surprising, then, that 85.4 per cent of the Chicanos of California live in urban areas. In the Southwest the number of city dwellers is but slightly less; only in New Mexico are the urban Chicanos a minority—little more than one-third of the state. The population of La Raza in urban areas from Arizona to Texas ranges from 69.3 to 78.6 per cent. The Chicano population of Los Angeles, Denver, and Phoenix is 10 to 20 per cent of the city; in Albuquerque it is 25 per cent; in San Antonio and El Paso 40 to 50 per cent; in Laredo 85 per cent. Even so, the barrios of the Chicanos are not like the gray tenement tombs of the ghetto. The barrios sprawl over the hills and into the arroyos and valleys, amid the weeds and flowers, like wandering In¬ dian villages. They are a paradox that defies easy comparisons. Ghettos are the refuse dumps of the industrial city. “Who creates the ghetto?” asks Eliezer Risco, the editor of La Raza, the newspaper of the barrios of East Los Angeles. “The ghetto is where you are forced to live by housing discrimination. But La Raza has been living in the barrios for hundreds of years. No one has forced us. The barrios are not ghettos, although we do have ghettos in the

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barrios. There are suburbs and there are skidrows; there are ghettos of the poor and there are neighborhoods of the rich. We have every¬ thing here that you have in the larger city, but one thing—you, in the larger city, govern us. We do not run our own lives because you do not let us. You run the barrios and you don’t know how.” “Barrio” is a Spanish word that simply means “neighborhood.” In the colonial era of Mexico the Spanish rulers subtly changed the meaning by using barrio to designate the “native quarter,” where the Indians lived. It was a word of contempt. The word barrio, as it is used in the United States to designate the Mexican or “Spanish” neighbor¬ hood, is a modern version of that colonial term; except that today the Chicanos have once more changed the demeaning meaning of the old colonial word to one of pride. It is a city within a city within a city. Wherever the outsider sees one barrio, there are not one but many barrios within the boundaries of family ties, origins in Mexico, or simply street-map geography. Each barrio has its own loyalties, churches, local shrines, shopkeepers, gangs of boys, customs, history, and old village patriarchs. “Urban villages” may be a better definition of “barrios.” In these communities the Chicanos try to live in the best of both worlds: those of the village and those of the city. “Why do you still live in East Los Angeles?” a man on the street is asked by La Voz, the newspaper of the Community Service Organi¬ zation. “Just a matter of being in a place something like the old country,” one man replies. Incongruous? Where in Los Angeles is Mexico? He feels it is in the barrios. Men and women who come from the rugged mountain towns of northern Mexico and the rural valleys of the Southwest to seek jobs in the city do so warily. In self-protection they bring their village ways with them. The rural feeling of independence, the little gardens, the religious ecstasies, the large and comforting family loves, the commu¬ nal ways of life—all of these give the urban villages and villagers a resilience that resists the numbing conformity of the concrete streets. None of these human exuberances fit within the confines of gray ghetto walls. In the old days a goat and a vegetable garden were more of a

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necessity for the survival of a barrio family than a car port. Some of the barrios are still derisively referred to by outsiders as “Goat Hill.” “Years ago Los Angeles was rural. It was all farms,” says Eduardo Perez, a barrio leader. He remembers that it was just one generation ago. “Where I was born, in East Los Angeles, there were Japanese farmers. Hundreds of vegetable farms. In World War II the Japanese farmers were put in concentration camps. And their land was con¬ fiscated. Up to then the Mexican people used to come to Los Angeles to work on the farms.” It was not simply out of migrant camps that the barrios grew. The people of the Sonoran deserts and mountains on both sides of the border could have moved into the ghetto tenements, but they would have been suffocated. “We need open sky,” Perez says, “or we would die. “Our people in northern Mexico are rural people,” Perez says. “We’re in the mess we’re in partly because of that. Mexicans coming to this country head for the countryside. We’re always going to the rural towns first to work in the fields, to do stoop labor. We’re being displaced by automation on the farms. So we go to the cities. In the barrios we know our countrymen will help us. We’re desperate. Where else can we go?”

The Masks of the Invisible Men On a fertile riverbank where a tribe of Indians had built a village of mud and reed huts, a strange band of brown, black, yellow, and red men appeared one day in 1781. These travelers decided to settle amid the native Californians. Industriously they built mud and reed huts of their own, and then proclaimed the tribal village to be a city—El

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Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula. In other words, L.A. The old faded records of the “Patron de Los Angeles” in the Ban¬ croft Library of Berkeley list these “Spanish settlers” who were the founding fathers of the city: Nine Mexican Indians Eight Mulattos Two Blacks Two Espanoles One Mesitzo

And there was the gentleman widower by the name of Antonio Rodriguez who alone had come without a wife. Rodriguez was Chi¬ nese. Of the twenty-three “Spanish settlers” who founded Los Angeles only two were Spanish. The earlier expeditions into the Southwest by Don Juan de Onate, Father Kino, Don Juan Bautista de Anza, and Father Garces had found few white faces. When, the lost party of Cabeza de Vaca wandered for a decade through the Southwest in the 1530’s, one of those bedraggled men found was Estevanico, the black Moor. One of the first Europeans to set foot in the Southwest was thus an African. On the expeditions of the Spaniards, the men and women recruited from the barrios of Mexican Indians and African slaves outnumbered the Spaniards by two and three to one. The pueblos they built around quiet plazas were more like those of the Indians than the grandiloquent style of baroque Spain. In their leisurely old houses descendants of the Espanoles Mejicanos, the Mexican-born “Spanish,” lived for hundreds of years. Nowadays all that remains of the memory of the original settlements is the tourist attractions: the “Old Town Plaza” of Albuquerque and Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles, but the heirs of the founding fathers have long since been deprived of their cultural inheritance and their prop¬ erty. History has all but obliterated our dark-skinned forefathers, who, after all, do not fit the romantic image of Spanish courtiers who, in the mythology of the textbooks, settled the Southwest.

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“Old Spanish families are an invention of the gringos,” wrote Ar¬ nold R. Rojas, the descendant of a generations-old Los Angeles family, in his The Vaquero. “They are a myth which paisanos have come to believe themselves as Sancho did his enchantment of Dulcinea in Don Quixote... . The Californiano—writers on California to the contrary—called himself a Sonoreno. [Sonora, the northernmost province of Mexico once embraced California.] I have heard third and fourth generation descendants of members of the De Anza expedition (in 1777) say, ‘Nosotros somos Sonorenos. Sonora es nuestra tierra. ’ We are Sonorans, Sonora is our motherland. “When the gringos took over the land,” wrote Rojas, “the paisano —if he did not migrate to Mexico, Chile, or Spain—gathered what few cattle were left him and disappeared into the most distant and isolated places he could find in the West, as far away from the marauding bands of gringos as he could get. Where is he now? Ask the lonely canyons and deserts of the far places. They could tell if they could talk.” In coming to the cities the rural villagers were returning to the homes of their forefathers. They rebuilt the barrios, in the style of the twentieth century, but they were strangers in their own cities. “Who’s got the land? Who’s got the money? Who’s got everything?” asks Eduardo Perez. “You Europeans who came here have taken our land away by conquest, have taken our jobs away with machines, have taken our women with false promises. We do not give up our women, but you take them. You have taken everything from us but our color. And you probably are working on that.” The newcomers from the East who had driven the Mexicans out thought of the original settlers as “foreigners.” They viewed the “Lit¬ tle Mexicos” of the cities with a mixture of fascination and fear, hatred and envy.

4

In the twenties, there was an uproar over the barrios. The isolation¬ ism of the times, as the country recoiled from the traumas of World War I, and the uneasy peace that was haunted by the specter of the Bolshevik Revolution, had culminated in a national hysteria against the “foreigners.” Cries of “The World Is at Our Portals” and “Guard Our Gates” were echoed in the Southwest as “Keep Out the Mongrel

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Mexicans” and “Lock the Back Door.” The mounting revolutions of Mexico, from the fall of Porfirio Diaz in 1910 to the triumph of Pancho Villa in 1917, had frightened newcomers to the Southwest and terrified the real-estate developers. The rhetoric of racism was voiced nationally by the warning of a Justice of the Supreme Court of New York, Norman Dike, who pro¬ claimed, “Diseased, ignorant and belonging to a greatly lower class, the Mexican elements are lowering the standard of our population as far north as Wyoming.” The Mexicans, said the Justice, were “the most undesirable of all of the peoples.” Justice Dike’s was one of the more somber voices. The chorus of exclusion reached its highest pitch in a book called The Alien in Our Midst, published in 1930. William Green, the president of the Ameri¬ can Federation of Labor, and John E. Edgerton, president of the National Federation of Manufacturers, called in unison for those “who are American in blood” to “call the roll of the armies of gunmen in our cities . . . worst criminals . . . anarchists, communists, foreign language newspapers and other lists of disturbers containing un¬ pronounceable or exchanged names” (Edgerton); and “To guard our gates” and ensure that “the Country contains at all times a great preponderance of those of British descent” (Green); for, as the presi¬ dent of the Immigration Study Commission, C. M. Goethe, wrote in that volume, the “Mexican menace to our homogeneity” threatens “our race purity.” On a fact-finding trip into the barrios of East Los Angeles, during 1927, the historical novelist Kenneth Roberts was shocked to find not only “Mexican half-breed Indians,” but “negroid blood” in the “chocolate-colored Mexican peons.” In The Alien in Our Midst (ed¬ ited by Madison Grant, Chairman of the New York Zoological So¬ ciety), the disturbed novelist wrote that the Mexican “mixed breeds [are] unfit to enter the United States,” for “they are inferior to immi¬ grants from Central and Southeastern Europe, and incompetent to advance, or even sustain the civilization already established in the United States.” Late that winter Roberts accompanied a “Relief Mission” of East

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Los Angeles “through two Mexican sections”; he wrote, “ ... in no part of Poland or Southeastern Europe has ever been seen a more ignorant and more destitute class of people than the Mexican peons packed into shacks and hovels that have spread out over those former truck garden districts. . . . The signs are in Spanish, the names are Mexican. They are an acute plague sore on the body politic.” Roberts then quoted Professor S. J. Holmes of the University of California: “ ‘The Mexican is prone to various diseases ... he brings in various maladies. . . . They are a constant menace to our physical welfare.’ ” In the 1930’s the barrios were of less interest to the civic authorities. The building booms of the Southwest collapsed in the money-tight depressions, and the lands of the “Little Mexicos” were no longer needed. Many emigrants decided to return to Mexico rather than face the humiliation of bread lines, and for several years the tide of immi¬ gration turned. Even the “Lock the Back Door” advocates were si¬ lenced by the unexpected turn of the poor away from the promised land. “I remember back thirty years,” says one woman, reliving the Depression years in East Los Angeles. “The leaders of the community in those years were what I call hard-core Mexico Mexicans who did sort of well. They had stores, you know. In those days we had a community organization where there would be dancing and vino and ‘Viva MejicoP and the 16th of September and Cinco de Mayo, and the men drunken as the dickens and the gringos, they would be watching, and it would embarrass us. So we decided to keep away from those people. You see, at the time we thought a Mexico Mexican was something to be ashamed of.” There was little hope in the barrios in the dim thirties. The poor stayed within the safety of their homes and fought about scarce jobs and Cinco de Mayo dances; few entered into the upheavals of that decade that shook up the cities. Life was in limbo until the post—World War II building boom ex¬ ploded in the barrios. That upset the quiet forever. The old cities of the Southwest, from Texas to California, doubled and tripled and quadrupled in size and population in the wake of the affluence that

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swept through the deserts after World War II. A sleepy, Sonoran desert town like Tucson, Arizona, moved from 45,454 in 1950 to 236,877 in 1965; old Albuquerque, New Mexico, from 35,500 in 1940 to 201,200 in 1960; the metropolitan area of San Antonio, Texas, from 525,852 in 1950 to 787,000 in 1960. Once more the old barrios stood in the way of progress and subur¬ ban developers. “Very rapid urbanization of the Southwest brought the absorption of [the] Mexican American barrios whose history can be traced to their function as former agricultural labor communities,” says the report Residential Segregation in the Urban Southwest of the UCLA Mexican American Study Project. Some barrios were bull¬ dozed. The oldest barrio of San Antonio in the heart of the city was leveled to rubble, and the 1,200 families that lived there were evicted to make way for the HemisFair of 1968. The nemesis of the barrios of Los Angeles has, of course, been the freeways. Chavez Ravine, an old barrio that was bulldozed to make way for freeways, parking lots, and the Dodgers’ Stadium, still echoes with the bitterness of the cry painted on the walls: “Remember Chavez Ravine!” “Naturally they built it in our backyards,” Grace Olivarez, a former state leader of Arizona, says of Highway 80, which curves through the backyards of the barrios of South Phoenix, Arizona. “Would you expect them to build a highway through the lawns of Scottsdale, or Goldwater’s swimming pool?” Hemmed in from the outside by the heritage of anti-Mexican racism and built up from the inside by the cultural pride of La Raza, the barrios were a paradox of poverty and strength. The barrios have existed for generations as communities with their own ways of life, their own leaders, their own language and culture and histories. Few outside would see, or would recognize, these hidden resources. The disguises of a colonial people are excellent. “No one looked ‘Mexican’ to me when I came to East Los An¬ geles,” Father Luce, a popular Episcopalian minister in the barrios, reports. “In the streets everyone looked so Anglo it startled me. I was determined to find out where the ‘Mexicans’ were hiding.”

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Even poverty is hidden. “I didn’t know what poverty was until I found out that I was poor,” says young David Sanchez, the prime minister of the Brown Berets, who grew up in the barrios of East Los Angeles. A university student, Frank David Cervantes, revisiting the barrios of his childhood in San Antonio, has the same startled thought. “I felt mostly shock and shame seeing this wasteland of poverty in which I had grown up. Until that moment I had never realized my family had lived in a ‘slum.’ ” A judicious observer, Paul Bullock of the Institute of Industrial Relations, University of California, writes in Poverty in the Ghetto, “No one can deny that poverty is less ‘visible’ in Los Angeles.” “Society doesn’t want to see us,” says Eduardo Perez. “Technology in the United States is so highly perfected that you cannot see any¬ thing you don’t want to see. A computer is as blind as the technician who runs it.” La Raza is still referred to as “the invisible minority” in official reports. The barrios are largely unknown and misunderstood by out¬ siders, even those who devote years to studying them; for the heritage of a colonial mentality blinds outsiders to the reality. It is no mystery to Eliezer Risco. “When you live in a hostile environment you learn to disguise yourself, so that you are not con¬ spicuous. You wear a mask.”

The Quaint Starve On the ruins of the oldest barrio of San Antonio, beneath yellow and pink umbrellas, with the flags of Texas, the United States, and the Holiday Inns flapping in the scorching August air, the one thousandth motel in the chain is opening.

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The Holiday Inn chairman is given a scroll declaring him an Honor¬ ary Alcalde of La Villita—the Mayor of the Little City—and the Urban Renewal Award of San Antonio. Where the motel gleams in the sun there was formerly “one of the densest slum, areas,” says Roland Bremmer, president of the city’s Urban Renewal Commission. “This shows what is being done throughout our great country to change the downtowns of America.” Where have the people of the barrio gone? Into “the quaint, the picturesque Mexican life on the Westside” as a tourist guide, San Antonio, by Charles Ramsdell, describes it. The Inferno, a La Raza newspaper of San Antonio’s Westside, sees these barrios differently: “With roofed-over corrals for homes and chutes for streets, San Antonio’s Westside is like a stockyard; its residents treated with less humanity than cattle. Perhaps as many as 200,000 Americans of Mex¬ ican descent are herded here, in what is one of America’s largest ghettos. ... “Roosters crowing, followed by barking dogs, then wailing young¬ sters, herald each new day on the Westside. It is the day of hard, dirty work for long hours and little pay. The Westsider is a hearty individual who has endured much. “One son is drafted into the Army to fight in Vietnam. Another son is sent to prison for breaking open cigarette machines. Yet the West¬ sider endures. His wife is in the hospital awaiting birth of their ninth child and the blessing of the Church, while his 12 year old daughter is receiving treatment in another ward for venereal disease. Yet the Westsider endures. He waits mostly for Saturday night when he can get drunk at the cantina with his friends who like himself are the wretched refuse of affluent America.” These are “The great unwashed, the unloved, their souls are mort¬ gaged and their tongues are locked with fear; yet they see and they feel and they wait for their redemption,” says Inferno; “... the despair of the people is ever deepening as magazines and movies from the ‘outside’ show them all they are missing.” The hearings of the Citizens’ Bbard of Inquiry into Hunger and Malnutrition in San Antonio produce expert testimony that 150,000

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people or so are hungry. Dr. Vera Burke, director of Social Services for the Bexar County Metropolitan Health District, which includes San Antonio, is questioned about the accuracy of this figure: Do you, or do you not, agree with that as a general figure? I would agree that this is probably true. Sixteen people starved to death in the barrios of San Antonio during 1965, James Kazen, the director of the Economic Opportunity Devel¬ opment Corporation, reports, although starvation is a statistic of death not officially recognized by the coroner. In the hearings of the Citizens’ Board of Inquiry into Hunger and Malnutrition in San Antonio, Sister Mary Rachel testifies: Would you try to just give a guess as to how many people you think in the San Antonio area might be in a state of need in regard to food? I think I could say about 25 per cent, probably. Maybe more. What would that be in numbers. Sister? I guess around two or three hundred thousand. “Malnutrition on the Westside relates to that of underdeveloped countries,” writes Patricio Tamez, in Inferno. In the same hearings another woman testifies.

Her name is

Theodora Hernandez: Raisins are the only fruit you get? Yes. No eggs? No vegetables? No. Another comes as a witness. Her name is Mrs. Julia Gonzales: How often do you get meat? Once in a while. And milk? Weekly. Sometimes we can, sometimes we can V. Do the children ever go to bed hungry? No. How about yourself? Do you ever go to bed hungry? I feed my children. “Often children are brought in [to the Robert B. Green Hospital] weighing less than their birth weight,” Dr. Vera Burke says. Expectant

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mothers are so anemic and undernourished that they are automati¬ cally given blood transfusions as part of the hospital routine. Dr. Charles Bernard Hilton of the Robert B. Green Hospital testi¬ fies: Are you a pediatrician? Yes sir. You are also associated with the Robert B. Green Hospital? Yes. How long have you been in San Antonio? Six years. Will you tell us something about what you have found here with children? I have seen children at the Robert B. Green, just as any doctor who has worked there has seen children, three, four, five years old, all weighing twenty pounds. In my Well-Baby Clinic I know of at least ten children who came to us at the age of two or three months, and they all weighed the same as their birth weight.

Almost half the men in the barrios are subemployed. Studies by the U.S. Department of Labor and the Texas Employment Commission of the “slum area of San Antonio” (84 per cent Mexican American) in November, 1966, showed that the national unemployment rate was 3.7 per cent, San Antonio’s 4.2 per cent, and the barrios’ officially 8 per cent: the subemployment rate was “a startling, sobering 47.4 per cent. ” “Subemployment” meant those working part time, although look¬ ing for full-time work (7.2 per cent of all men between twenty and sixty-four); those working full time but receiving low wages (below the poverty level—44.5 per cent); labor force dropouts who are not work¬ ing and have given up looking for a job (8.9 per cent); and “those who are known to be present in the community but who do not show up at all in a survey” (15 per cent). These men—“the truly invisible people of our society”—are omitted from traditional “unemploy¬ ment” statistics; the Labor Department reported, therefore, that “na¬ tional measurements of unemployment are utterly irrelevant” to the barrios. “No conceivable increase in the gross national product would stir these backwaters,” said the Labor Department; “inferior education, no skills, discrimination, fatherless children, unnecessarily rigid hiring

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practices and hopelessness” isolate the barrios. The family income in the barrios that year averaged $2,876 compared with the national average of $6,300—less than half. In the hearings, another woman testifies: Mrs. Roma, how many children do you have? Six. Where do you live, please? I live with my father-in-law. How many rooms do you have to live in? One. One room for the eight of you? Yes. Do you do your cooking and everything in this one room? Yes. Do you have enough to eat? We have $25 a week to spend on food. What does this food you eat consist of? Beans, potatoes, eggs, string beans, or peas. Do you see meat in your house at all? Oh, yes. Sometimes chicken. Tell me more about this one room you live in. Do you have cooking facilities? Yes. A kerosene stove. What do you use for heating when it gets cold? The kerosene stove. Do you find the $25 a week is enough to feed your family? No. Would you say that the children go hungry? Yes. Do they get milk, the small ones? No. No milk at all? No. They are not getting any milk? No.

In his journeys the Holiday Inn chairman had visited Jerusalem. He had walked in the site of the stable where Christ was born. “That’s why we’re building Holiday Inns,” Kemmons Wilson tells his guests at the festive opening of the beautiful motel where once there was a barrio of the poor. “So there will always be room at the Inn.”

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The Communal Colony In the irrigated desert water is life. But in the barrio of Wasco in the thirsty fields of the San Joaquin Valley, the water is filthy. The city has its own water system, for its white residents. On the edge of the fields the barrio of the brown residents has a separate water system. For years it tasted foul. The clothes washed in the water were stained. Nonsense! the city officials replied, had the water analyzed, and pro¬ nounced it clean. Sixty-seven of the barrio residents sought the help of lawyers at the California Rural Legal Assistance office in nearby McFarland, who had the water analyzed by a private chemist. Chemical impurities, was the chemist’s report. The water is dangerous to drink. The lawyers filed complaints with the California Board of Health and the city’s Public Utilities Commission. Long conferences were held, until it was finally agreed that steps would be taken. The residents received re¬ funds of $3,000 for water bills paid for the impure water, from July, 1966, to May, 1967. “Our water didn’t smell any better,” says a barrio resident. “But after that it tasted just a bit sweeter.” Life in the barrios is like living in “a colony” to Esteban Torres, director of the East Los Angeles Labor Community Action Commit¬ tee and an International Representative of the United Auto Workers. He believes the second-class citizenship in city services is due to the lack of the communities’ control of their civic life. Usually the barrios are on the outskirts of the cities, beyond the concern of the city halls. The streets may be poorly paved, or unpaved. Sewers do not always extend to the edges of the barrios. Even the mail deliveries do not always reach into the streets where people are so poor they cannot

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afford mailboxes. There is little native industry and few but menial and manual jobs. There is less local capital. If there are businessmen in the barrios with money to invest they must go outside of the barrios to invest it. Torres says: Our money flows out rather than in, and this leaves the barrio impoverished. “East Los Angeles is a colony,” he says, because it has no “community control” over its economic and political life. “Much of industry’s alleged ‘open-door policy’ [for the barrios] has been nothing but a well-planned Madison Avenue ‘smoke screen’ to impress federal compliance officers,” complains the director of East Los Angeles’ Mexican American Opportunities Foundation, Dionicio Morales. Jobs offered to barrio youth are usually of the dead-end sort. Morales says. The subtle and overt discrimination in industry frus¬ trates any economic advancement. Agencies such as Jobs for Progress (SER), sponsored by the American GI Forum, the League of Latin American Citizens, and the Community Service Committee, financed by a $5 million federal grant, have made little dent in the economic wall that surrounds the barrios. “We have a colonial mentality?” says a barrio leader. “Of course! You treat us like colonials.” Ironically, the United States Commission on Civil Rights itself has been accused of job discrimination against Chicanos by one of its former employees, Nicolas Vaca, a graduate student at San Francisco State College. He testified that the Commission on Civil Rights “has systematically, knowingly and insidiously practiced discrimination.” At a Los Angeles hearing he charged angrily that in its ten years of existence the civil rights body had not employed a Mexican American on its Washington, D.C., staff of 115. Nor had it issued a single report on the civil rights of the Spanish-speaking in all those years. “We, regretfully, do not find concerted willingness on the part of industry or government to give the employment needs of the Mexican American serious and sufficient attention,” Dionicio Morales has ob¬ served. Economic problems of the barrios “are increasing in both magnitude and complexity.” From 1960 to 1965 because of inflation, the “purchasing power, or

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‘real income’ of the average East Los Angeles family fell off by nearly $400 annually.” The late Senator Robert Kennedy compared the dilemma of the poor caught in this economic squeeze to that of an “underdeveloped nation within our nation.” He recommended enlisting “the power and resources of our private enterprise system.” But the Wall Street Jour¬ nal was cautious, and less than enthusiastic, about what it called “a Marshall Plan for the city slums”: “There is a built-in limit on business efforts. We think the private economy does indeed have broad social responsibilities, but those responsibilities cannot supplant the business of doing business.” Frustrated and disillusioned by the repeated failures of outside agencies, barrio leaders have begun to seek economic solutions within the barrios themselves. A group of Hispano businessmen in Albuquerque, New Mexico, discuss the prospectus of a La Raza bank that would reinvest its funds within the barrios with “low interest loans to our people who have difficulty getting loans from the Anglo banks.” In El Paso, Texas, a shopkeeper and former head of the Community Action Programs, Jesus Terrazan, draws up an ingenious plan for a chain of Cooperative Shopping Centers to utilize the handicraft skills of barrio artisans. He proposes they be built like modernized village marketplaces of Mexico. In Denver, Colorado, a plan for Chicano control of barrio economy is offered by Rodolfo Gonzales of the Crusade for Justice: “We de¬ mand that businesses serving our community be owned by the com¬ munity. Seed money is required to start cooperative grocery stores, gas stations, furniture stores, etc. Instead of our people working in big factories across the city, we want training and low-interest loans to set up small businesses in our own communities. These industries would be coops with the profits staying in the community.” In East Los Angeles a Civic Improvement group submits architec¬ tural plans for a barrio housing project to be constructed on communal lines to accommodate the large Mexican family groups. The units are to be built around little plazas, with families living together in clusters of apartments. The City Fathers reject the plans in favor of a high-rise

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apartment skyscraper, which the barrios’ leaders in turn reject. A campaign to re-establish East Los Angeles as a “separate city” nearly wins: “We tried to incorporate the barrios as a separate city a few years ago,” says Eduardo Perez. “East Los Angeles ought to govern itself. But the unions opposed us. It’s not good for economic reasons, they said; you know, not enough industries, and so on. So we lost, by just three hundred and some votes. One day we will win.” “Water?” scoffs a former teacher in the urban barrios near the city of McAllen, Texas: “We have to buy water in jugs, or bring it home in barrels. No water! No sanitation! No drainage in the streets! No sewers! People don’t have a damned thing when it comes to city services. My neighbor has no electric lights, right in the middle of the city. Across the street, in that house you see, half of the floors are earth. The good earth! Housing in these barrios is ten times worse than the worst slum in any northern city. It’s worse than Mississippi. I tell people in the university what it’s like in these barrios and they don’t believe. You know, things are not supposed to be that way in this country.” Esteban Torres foresees industries, stores, and banks, “such as cooperatives, credit unions, etc., controlled and run by the commu¬ nity.” They will “resolve the social, economic, and political grievances of the community.” For centuries before the coming of the Anglos the barrios had “community control.” The sloganized cry for brown power, or Chicano power, is not new. The unique and communal life of the villages, the ejidos, and the patron benevolences on the frontier gave La Raza its distinctive character in the Southwest. “What are the alternatives?” asks one of the wealthiest Chicano businessmen in the Southwest. “You control us? That’s the way it has been, but our young people won’t stand for that any longer. We control you? That’s too foolish to talk about. No one suggests such nonsense. We control ourselves? That’s the only solution that makes any sense, or will do any good. That’s what we want to do, and we will decide how we will do it.” Dionicio Morales indicates the sobering alternatives: “I say to the nation: Look around you! See what is happening! People must work,

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they must belong, or they will start appropriating what they have long been told is theirs rightfully as American citizens. The Mexican American has not yet been strongly militant. I pray that he will not have to resort to molotov cocktails to focus national attention on his economic need.”

Evening in the Barrios “It is more beautiful at night,” Risco muses. Evening has come. On the twilit street little children play Bat Man in the patios of Pachuco. The tropical flowers around the pastel houses close their petals against the night smog. In the sky the neon lights of the Taco-Burger stands explode like fireworks. Where the supermar¬ kets are like rural fairs, the men push shopping carts full of pinto beans, Coca-Cola, frozen tortillas, and TV dinners. On the marquees of the movies there is a nostalgia of Mexico that is so near, less than a few hours distant, but beyond reach. On the curbs the old cars gleam brightly as color television screens, the pinatas of the urban villagers. The barrios do not sleep well at night. It is too late to talk, but it is too early to sleep. It seems a million miles away. Wistfully the young man closes his eyes. He lifts his head for a moment, letting the night breeze bathe his face and dry the sweat of the summer day. Eyes wide, he peers into the darkness. “I see clearly at night,” says Eliezer Risco, young editor of La Raza. He sees then what he cannot see by day. He is the “tough organizer” of the barrio, “swarthy” and “mysterious,” a popular magazine has written of him. The Los Angeles police have arrested him for “con¬ spiracy.” Yet, he has gentle, sad eyes. His voice is soft and thoughtful as a poet’s. “If I was a religious man', I would be a Franciscan Father. The Desert Fathers—I dig that,” he muses.

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“You are a paradox,” I say. “Every Latin is a paradox,” he says. “The Chicano is the quintes¬ sence of paradoxes.” “So is the barrio?” “Look at this street. Would you say it is a ghetto? A slum? We say that ourselves. But there are few more beautiful places in the city than this barrio. What is more peaceful? Where is it more beautiful?” “It reminds me of a village on the Mediterranean coast,” I say. “Well, they are Latins too. You know, when I came here they told me that Los Angeles was the graveyard of La Raza. It is a hard, paranoiac town, they told me. That may be so, but that is the Anglo side of town. That is not the Mexican side of town. Here there is a beauty, a friendliness, a communality that no one writes about on the outside, no one on the outside knows about. He is a mosaic, the Chicano of the barrio. One of these days we will put that mosaic together. Then everyone will see what beauty really is.”

XII

The Conquered Country

“It was a wedding dance. Everybody was dancing. These cops come to the door. One cop gives the signal to the other: Let’s get him! They charge onto the dance floor, not asking anyone’s permission. They knock this man down, kick him. They said he had narcotics. All of a sudden there are twenty cops breaking in the doors. Cops with shot¬ guns, with riot equipment. Jumping on the stage. Walking on the wedding gifts. Yelling at the band, ‘You stupid asses! Quit playing! This is it!’ Pushing the ladies with those nightsticks. Shooting that Mace at the wedding guests.” The member of the wedding who relives the Walpurgis Night in the summer of 1968 is still dazed by it. He bewilderedly shakes his head. “People kept on dancing. They didn’t want to get involved!” On that Fourth of July weekend four hundred guests had gathered for the wedding party of Virginia Vargas and Edilberto Olmos at the El Monte American Legion Hall in the hedged and quiet community of El Monte of Los Angeles. Most of El Monte’s residents are, or pretend to be, proper members of the Mexican American middle class, with emphasis on the American. Sixty policemen, summoned from five police departments in outly¬ ing suburbs as well as that of El Monte, attended the wedding party,

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and circled the Legion Hall in a score of patrol cars. The wedding guests tried to flee in their flower-decorated cars, and in the confusion, several were arrested—and a passer-by as well. In a church hall, a few days later, the wedding guests gather again to discuss the events. Mr. Vargas sits silent. He seems too stunned to speak. “The language that the officers used was just terrible, ” says an outraged matron. “Even if we don’t use such language, I am going to quote it, but I can’t. One officer said, ‘That’s what happens when we let Mexicans have a party.’ Well, the guests at this wedding were respectable people.” “All Mexicans are,” says a young man. She gazes disdainfully at him. “And they banged on the hoods of our new cars with their clubs, and they cursed us. They cursed us.” “They sprayed Mace in my eyes. They sprayed my girlfriend in her eyes,” a teen-age boy says. “We were leaving—they asked us to leave. Then they sprayed us. I had Mace in my eyes so bad I could hardly see.” “Children were crying. I saw quite a few gassed,” an elderly man speaks up. “A man too, his face swelled up. His eyes were damaged by Mace. I thought it was tear gas. But who tear-gasses a wedding? ‘Mace is better,’ an officer told me, ‘than hitting heads.’ It’s scientific.” “One cop shoved a kid with his nightstick. The kid said, ‘I don’t like to be pushed.’ So the cop smashed the kid in the face.” This is the teen-ager again. “I was walking by the hall. I didn’t know there was a fight,” a man reports. “Then I see a friend of mine being beat up by a cop. ‘Lay off him,’ I said, ‘he didn’t do anything.’ The cop screamed at me, ‘Get the hell out of here!’ ” “Weren’t you arrested?” “He arrested me on Section 148—‘inciting to riot.’ ” The matron goes on. “I heard one of the officers say into his radio, ‘Reporting a riot at the El Monte Legion Hall.’ He saw me watching him and he turned a\yay, embarrassed. He ought to have been. Now, how could there be a riot when one man is fighting two officers?” “I heard it too,” says a young man, “the riot code on the police wave

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length—Code Four, I think. So I said to a cop, ‘There’s no riot. Why don’t you call back the cars on the same wave length?’ He said he couldn’t do that. He won’t listen. Why not?” “Because he was lying.” An elderly man talks. “We went to the police chief to complain. He laughed. ‘If we hadn’t broken it up, you people might have gotten drunk and run off with the bride,’ the police chief said. He laughed.” “We never caused them any trouble, so why did they attack us?” a young girl asks. “It was a Mexican wedding,” a man replies. There is nothing more to say. There is nothing quite as happy as a Mexican wedding. Some men may even drink too much, and sing of Zapata off key. And the officers may be summoned to silence the singers. But why the riot police? It is a Sunday afternoon. On the wall over the piano Christ hangs on His cross. There is a sadness in the church hall. Everyone knows: It is the way it is. “Gabachos/” a community leader curses. “It is the white cop. The gabacho with the gun. He is conditioned, he is programed to treat us Mejicanos that way. He sees a lot of brown faces and he doesn’t see human beings. He feels he can treat us any way he likes and get away with anything. Years and years he has been doing this. “They are not preventing violence. They are creating it. They are not building community relations. They are building up animosity.” “But why? Why do they do this to us?” asks the suburban commu¬ nity leader. It is not the behavior of the police that shocks the wedding guests —the dweller in the barrio expects to be treated like a second-class citizen. He knows he is. What shocks the wedding guests is the pre¬ sumption of racial inferiority that enables the police to treat all Mejicanos with the same brutality, without seeing a difference be¬ tween a wedding party and a brawl in a bar. “We are a conquered people,” says Bert Corona, the past president of the Mexican-American Political Association. “The behavior of the police toward our people will not let them forget that.” Few if any, of the white officers live in the barrio they patrol, and

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few know the language of the people. The barrio is not home to them, but a strange place of strangers who have unfamiliar ways and an unknown culture. “We are foreigners to them,” says Eliezer Risco, the La Raza editor, “and they are foreigners to us.” In the routine of barrio life there is mutual fear of these “foreigners.” “The police [have] fear of the Mexican American and would kill him out of fear rather than out of justice,” D. C. de Herrera writes in Denver’s El Gallo. The officers of the law are familiar strangers: abstract, respected, cursed, and feared. In the barrio they are not called policia in proper Spanish, but by the name of their stigma, “placas, pigs, gabachos, chortas, dog pack, pendejos. Mister, motherfuckers, los muertes, the Man.” One young man in the Boyle Heights barrio of Los Angeles tells me: “The cops are just nothing but Anglo Pachucos. Man, we learn every¬ thing we know about street fights from them. They teach us from when we were little kids. It’s like basic training, except they use live ammo.” In the streets there is unseen warfare, not between gangs of boys, the Pachucos of legends—that is a daily headline—but between ordi¬ nary citizens and police. One family fight, of many, was that of the Santoyo family. The police were duly summoned, and La Raza re¬ ported the consequences: “The Santoyos, father, mother, and daugh¬ ter, were beaten; the father into unconsciousness—he was kicked, slapped, pushed, pulled by the hair and insulted verbally with terms like ‘Mexican animals!’” Five of the Santoyo brothers, mother, daughter and father, were tried and convicted, hot of fighting each other, but of fighting the police. These are minor skirmishes that do not become headlines. But from time to time there is deadly violence. Here are a few who‘were shot by police in one barrio in one city in one year: A young boy, Louis Pinedo, is killed in a dark street in Denver by an officer’s bullet. Patrolman John Cain argues self-defense and is acquitted of wrongful death. “Gunshot wound, back,” says the medi¬ cal autopsy on the teen-ager. He was seventeen and small. The barrio leaders march on the City Fathers. On a downtown street, Andrew Garcia—he is twenty-three—shot

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to death by an officer moonlighting as a bouncer in a bar. Two women who are walking by say they have to pull Patrolman Harold MacMillen from the body of the dying boy: he was clubbing the youth with his revolver. In the bedroom of his home, in his girl’s arms, Richard Medina, age twenty, was shot three times. He was thought to be armed, but his girl says, “While I was holding him the policeman came in and started shooting. After he stopped, Richard dropped from my arms to the floor.” He did not die. Joey Archuleta died on the street on a summer day. Patrolman Theodore Zavashlak says he tripped and his gun went off. Joey was 15. The officer is cleared, the shooting “accidental.” Once more the barrio marches through downtown Denver to City Hall and the Police Headquarters. Robert Gene Castro, age fifteen, is shot to death in his home. The shootings were reported in El Gallo within a single year. Yet there are those to whom “police brutality, harassment and inhumanity is only a figment of the poor peoples’ imagination,” the barrio newspa¬ per caustically wrote. “Denver has had no riot to date [the summer of 1968], but the toll of injured and killed in the Mexican American community [at the hands of the police] continues to mount. ...” Hardly a year after this editorial there was a riot in the Denver barrios. The police had shot still another Chicano youth, and high school students rampaged through the streets in protest, overturning cars, smashing windows, until dozens of schoolchildren were injured, or arrested. “More Chicanos are killed by cops on the streets of the Southwest than any other minority group in the population,” writes a young man in a barrio newspaper. He calls it “Chicano birth control.” Yearly “the wild-West shooting of minorities by the police” grows worse, charges investigator D. C. de Herrera, the chairman of the Denver barrio’s own Police Review Board. “To the Mexican Ameri¬ can in Denver, the Police Department presents one of the biggest problems. They have absolutely no respect for our rights. They search our homes, our automobiles, and otir own persons without any search warrants and due process of law.”

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Police “lawlessness” is denied by the stoic, white-haired chief of the Denver Police, George L. Seaton. “Attempts are regularly made to depict officers in an unflattering manner, or to improperly charge them with misconduct,” the chief complains. “Such claims tend to create a ‘bad’ image of policemen.” “Chief,” reporters on the Denver Post ask, “do you feel there is any discrimination on the part of Denver policemen in dealing with Hispanos or Negroes?” “Occasionally there may be some kind of discrimination,” the po¬ lice chief replies. “When I find out about it, it is stopped, or it is corrected. On a large scale—definitely not. ... I think Denver gets along very well with their minority people.” In a speech to a luncheon of the City Club, in the Brown Palace Hotel, the troubled police chief voices his deeper concerns. By 1985 the minorities will be the majority of the population of cities such as Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans, Cleveland, Oakland, St. Louis, and perhaps some in the Southwest. “Such things as joblessness, poor education and discrimination” will be a “cause for conflicts,” Chief Seaton says. “Law enforcement is attempting to cope with problems far beyond what was ever considered to be its area of responsibility. “To these minority citizens the police are widely recognized as the most visible symbol of a system which they believe is discriminatory and unjust,” the Denver police chief laments. The apostle of nonviolence in the Chicano movement visits Denver at about this time. Cesar Chavez tells members of the Crusade for Justice that he too has suffered from the violent police: “For those who have never suffered from police brutality it is impossible to discuss the problem, and for those who have nothing is more degrading and barbarous than police brutality. “We must draw the lines once and for all,” says the gentle leader of the campesinos. In Los Angeles the newspaper La Raza describes the nature of the “degrading” behavior by the police. The “frisking, harassment, name calling and brutality” is a “daily occurrence” in the streets. La Raza cites what it says is a typical incident on an ordinary day: One summer afternoon five young and unemployed Chicanos who enrolled in a job-training program at a “Skill Center” are having lunch. They are

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horsing around. Local police arrest the restless youths on “suspicion” of being high, possessing narcotics. In the trunk of one boy’s car they find a tool box; so they charge him with theft of that, too. But the tool box turns out to belong to the boy’s father, none of the youths has any narcotics, and they are released for “lack of evidence” after a night in jail. The youths voice hatred of the police. “Racism!” they charge, and the barrio newspaper editorializes: “The suspicion was based solely on the fact that they were Mexican.” All the natives look suspicious to an “occupying army” of colonialists, and so “the Chicano is always the criminal,” a young man writes to the newspaper. “Americans of Mexican descent are subject to discriminatory treat¬ ment by law-enforcement officers,” Dr. Hector P. Garcia, a United States Civil Rights Commissioner, says flatly. Investigation in the barrios across the Southwest, by staff lawyers of the federal body, revealed a state-by-state pattern of legal and police harassment, the Commissioner asserts. These investigators report: “The most serious issue encountered in the course of the Commission’s study is harass¬ ment and abuse of Americans of Mexican descent by law-enforcement officers. Such conduct ranges from unjustified arrests to insults, threats and, not infrequently, physical assaults,” Dr. Garcia told the Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor. In the courts the complaints of injustices suffered by La Raza de¬ fendants were equally prevalent. The “unfair legal practices” reported in the barrios, Dr. Garcia testified, involve widespread charges that Chicanos are “excluded from jury service, denied equal access to bail and adequate counsel, and [are] employed in disproportionately low numbers in law-enforcement agencies.” The legal system is often designed “to keep Mexicans in their place,” the Civil Rights Commissioner concluded. He termed such practices “rather sordid.” Laws are written, laws are enforced, and laws are judged by those outside the barrio. The Chicano who obeys the law of his traditions, the moral codes of his family, and the social customs of the barrio may find himself opposed by the laws of the outside society. Even the way dispute is settled by a barrio family may violate half a dozen laws of the Anglo society. What the Chicano does may not seem unlawful to

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him, but he is a criminal simply by being a Chicano. “Law and order doesn’t seem to be the practice of the Los Angeles Police Department,” says La Raza. “The Eastside [of Los Angeles] is becoming a no man’s land in which the people have no protection whatsoever from the services rendered by the Police Department.” Seeking to overcome the gap of hostility, Chief Thomas Reddin of the Los Angeles Police Department holds and personally participates in a series of “Police-Community Relations Conferences.” One of these is held at the Church of the Epiphany in the summer of 1967. Reddin is a forceful man of the “modern breed of police officials,” who have read much sociology and who sincerely believe in honest con¬ frontations. He talks amiably with a group of barrio youth leaders. Among them is David Sanchez, then chairman of the Mayor’s Youth Advisory Council. It goes well until the barrio youth offers a petition of demands: “That an Executive Order by Chief Reddin be sent to the Commanders and men [in] all predominantly Mexican American communities to cease immediately any form of physical violence, harassment, name-calling and bad treatment by the Los Angeles Po¬ lice Department,” and that there be “an Executive Order establishing equal protection under the law in predominantly Mexican areas—fast response to calls, etc.” “I don’t receive demands,” Chief Reddin replies. “I am not suscep¬ tible to demands. I am here to explain our position.” The conference ends in hostility. Youth and police return to their homes on the opposite sides of the barrier of the barrio. In a tone of frustration, La Raza wrote, “Conferences, seminars, workshops, TV shows, banquets, luncheons, and what-have-you.... Meanwhile Reddin’s ‘hired hands’ run amuck in the streets.” It was not that communi%

cations had broken down, but that communications had widened the gap of hostility. Rather than bridge the gap, the talks had apparently increased it by revealing the depth of the differences between those inside and outside the barrio. “Nothing has changed in the streets,” was La Raza's final word. Succinct, too, was the later comment of John Marquez, president of the Pico Rivera Young Men’s Association: “The police don’t want us on the streets.”

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The young men now talk of self-defense, both on the street corners and in the universities. And it is not only talk. “What is self-defense?” I asked Obed Lopez, the young leader of the Latin American Defense Organization of Chicago. “You think of guns,” Lopez replies. “That’s not what we mean by self-defense. It’s not the vigilante thing, or the Minutemen. Selfdefense means protection of our people from the injustices we feel the police subject us to. Yes, but it means more. The defense of our people from being pushed around by housing authorities, welfare investiga¬ tors, draft boards, anybody. It means the defense of the whole commu¬ nity.” “Civil rights, then?” I ask. “What is civil rights in the barrio?” Lopez says. “So far we don’t exist in the eyes of the law, of most of the country. First we have to be recognized as a community, respected as a people. Then we can talk about civil rights and it will mean something.” “Then what are you defending?” “Our right to exist.” In Chicago the Latin American Defense Organization was or¬ ganized after the riot in the Puerto Rican barrio in the summer of 1966. Led by Obed Lopez, a volatile and quick-tongued young Mexi¬ can, its activists are largely Chicano youth and students. Within a few years it has become one of the barrio’s most militant, best-known storefront centers of community activity. Lopez’s group contributed to the making of the Poor People’s Campaign and the unmaking of Governor George Romney’s presidential campaign in a nationally publicized

confrontation.

Self-defense,

as

Lopez

sees

it,

extends

beyond the barrio. In Denver the Crusade for Justice was founded in the spring of 1966, in a civil rights battle. But that battle quickly developed into a wide-ranging barrio group, with self-defense one of its organizational aims. It has its own “security” force, whose aim is not only to protect the barrio but also to safeguard its activists. It was praised by police officers in Washington, D.C., during the Poor People’s Campaign, for its discipline in maintaining order. In New Mexico, the Alianza Federal of Reies Tijerina has not only

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“security officers” but a citizens’ constabulary of Hispano rural villag¬ ers. One village, Tierra Amarilla, has publicly elected its own landgrant “sheriff,” and several communities have quietly done the same. In Los Angeles, the Brown Berets, with their motto of “Serve— Observe—Protect,” were originally founded as a self-defense unit of barrio youth. Patrols of young Chicanos to maintain law and order have been suggested by Brown Beret leader David Sanchez. On demonstrations by Chicano youths, the Brown Berets have placed “our bodies between the police and the kids” to protect the demon¬ strators, Sanchez says. In San Antonio an ex-convict has organized a self-defense group— mano,

the Mexican American Nationalist Organization—whose

members are mostly “ex-convicts of Mexican descent,” like himself. As Inferno, the newspaper of the old and historic barrio, describes it, their “primary reason for organizing is to curb police brutality on San Antonio’s Westside.” Few men know the law as intimately as these. “We have about 300 members,” says the founder. Alberto “Beto” Martinez, a handsome young man, explains that “most of them don’t speak English. They go to court and plead guilty to anything. Man, the deck is stacked against them.” He defends the membership of “his people” in a community group dedicated to enforcing law and order: “You cannot preach freedom unless you have been denied freedom.” Beto is a legend in the barrio. He is self-taught, educated in the streets and jails. He knows “ex-con and Muslim, pimp and priest, junky and politician.” He drinks and talks and fights hard. Beto has worked with Cesar Chavez in California and Reies Tijerina in New Mexico. Of the traditional barrio leaders he says, “All these cats talk, talk, talk.” He prefers to be “where the grassroots begin,” where “the action is.” He distrusts “the gringo in uniform,” whether police or priest, Inferno says. To the new Chicano leaders civil rights are more than equality before the law. “Equality is but a word,” Rodolfo Gonzales writes. “Here I stand before the Court of Guilty Justice.” Of civil rights, Reies Tijerina says, “Courts have been death traps for our people.” And Cesar Chavez has said, “We are weak. And the weak have no rights, but the right to sacrifice, until they are strong.”

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Rodolfo Gonzales writes in his poem, “I am Joaquin”: My land is lost, and stolen, My culture has been raped, I lengthen the line at the welfare door, and fill jails with crime.

Yes, we demand “the guarantee of our constitutional rights,” La Raza explains, but we demand something more, “our rights as a people who have their own culture, their own language, their own heritage, and their own way of life.” Civil rights become cultural rights. In the church hall, where the wedding guests gathered, they form the El Monte Committee for Self-Defense. They politely request the expected redress of grievances and an apology from the uninvited guests at the wedding. Let the Police Department desist from “all brutal tactics toward our people,” and let “the charges against those arrested for protesting the brutal tactics of the El Monte Police be dropped,” and let “there be an open investigation into the El Monte Police Department.” Then comes the wedding guests’ extraordinary request, “that mem¬ bers of the [Police] Department receive careful [my emphasis] instruc¬ tions in the rich heritage of the Mexican people to avoid future mistreatment of these proud and dignified people.” “Four hundred people have lost faith in the Police Department,” say the wedding guests. “We were shocked by the way we were shoved, struck. Maced, and verbally abused while we were complying with police orders to disperse.” The “insensitive police” were re¬ quested therefore to promise “treatment of us with the same dignity given to Anglo people.” For it was by respect, not only for their civil rights but for their cultural rights, that the police would “restore our faith” that has been “lost.” Yet the thought is not that extraordinary. In the meeting with Chief Thomas Reddin of the Los Angeles Police, the Chicano youth had demanded that the chief of police issue “an executive order requiring all officers in predominantly Mexican areas to take extensive [my

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emphasis] training in the language, history, culture, and prevailing conditions in those communities.” In the Chicano Student, a barrio youth had written of the East Los Angeles police: When I walk down our street I am afraid I am afraid not of the meager lights or of the boys grown old before their time— But of the white helmets that hold lead-weighted night sticks . . .

The father of the bride says to me with dignified pride, “I always supported my local police. But no more.” He joins the El Monte Committee for Self-Defense.

XIII

In the Suburbs of the Spanish Myths

The ornamental hardware dealer needed money. He was a merchant of suburban baroque, and his San Antonio business was expanding. Emanuel Salias requested a $10,000 loan from the Small Business Administration. It was quickly approved, for baroque was booming in the suburbs. Then, just before Easter, 1969, a Special Assistant in the local Small Business Administration office, Albert Fuentes, Jr., met the hardware man, and the results were scandalous. In a sworn state¬ ment the merchant accused his benefactor of offering him more money than he wanted if he would incorporate his business to include Fuentes and a few friends, “and pledge them 49 per cent of the corporation.” He was shocked, Emanuel Salias said. Congressman Henry Gonzalez of San Antonio held a press confer¬ ence to air the charges. He had reason to believe that Fuentes “has engaged in, or attempted to engage in, shakedowns of Small Business Administration loan applicants.” The Democratic lawmaker urged that Fuentes be “immediately” suspended pending an investigation by the FBI. The scandal has shaken the suburban barrio. Fuentes is a man of influence. He is a pillar of the middle-class community who had been the chairman of the Political Association of Spanish-Speaking As-

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sociations, a member of County Commissioner Albert Pena’s staff, and the regional director of the “Viva Nixon!” presidential campaign in Texas—this last an endeavor hardly likely to make him popular with Congressman Gonzalez, a loyal supporter of the Democratic ticket. Fuentes denied the accusations. His innocence was defended by Eddie Montez, a prominent San Antonio executive and former Board President of the Edgewood School District, who publicly testified that the “49 per cent” deal was intended for him and him alone. In anger, Congressman Gonzalez attacked the Montez mea culpa: “His reputation as a wheeler and dealer is well established.” The sordid little scandal became more incestuous when it was revealed that the self-confessed “wheeler and dealer,” Eddie Montez, had been on the staff of Congressman Gonzalez for several years, before he was fired. On the day that this news story appeared in the San Antonio Express a reader, C. E. Pratt, wrote the newspaper: “U.S. Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez is much upset over a small item of behind-the-scenes finagling involving SBA personnel and their friends trying to grab off large chunks of small businesses . . . but since when is this anything new, or surprising?” Yet, all of these men are respected leaders of the La Raza middle class of the city. Some of them trace their family names to the Spanish conquistadors. In a sense, they still live in the suburbs of the Spanish myths, though they have little left of that nobility but the conquest of an ornamental hardware business. “Once you were the master of all you surveyed, and your head of cattle were countless in South Texas. As adventurous, carefree and pleasure-loving Dons, you dealt with the friendly Tejas and the savage Apaches. A Nordic cloud appeared in the north and slowly but re¬ morselessly grew into monstrous proportions. You gallantly at¬ tempted to stem the tide, but you were swept in the current. You swore allegiance to a new country, but went on revering old heroes. The invaders, of course, brought their own customs and made their own laws. The gulf has grown so in the years that still you are a different people, merely tolerated as citizens of a nation in which you resided even before you joined the Union! Your pleasure-loving ways, your good nature have been unable to cope with the energetic, wealth¬ seeking characteristics of the Nordics.

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“Conditions have reached a point where your neighbors say ‘a white man and a Mexican!’ Yet in your veins race the hot blood of adventur¬ ous Castilian noblemen, the whitest blood in the world, and the blood of the cultured Aztecs and fierce Apaches, the reddest blood in the world! So why this disgraceful slap in the face? You can hold your head up with the best, and you should do so in order to keep your ancestors from turning in their graves.” A man with the noble name of Rodolfo A. de la Garza wrote these embittered words in an essay, “Who Are You?” in September, 1932. The resentments of lost pride still enfuriate the former aristocrats and embryo middle class of the barrios. Even the decades of growing political influence and suburban affluence have not soothed the feel¬ ings of impotence and insult. “All the Presidential conferences and protest marches in the world cannot erase one hundred and twenty years of defeat and humilia¬ tion,” says a brilliant young professor with a historic Mexican name. “You know very well I could be president of this university, and to 90 per cent of the Anglos of the country I would still be a ‘Spik,’ ‘dirty Mex,’ ‘Hey, Pancho,’ ‘a nigger.’ ” “Where can we hide from you?” the professor asks. “It’s your country. So the only way we can hide from you is by becoming like you. Great! That way you think that we are paying you the compli¬ ment of imitation; and you pay us a compliment by saying ‘You are different.’ What a farce!” Some have fled the barrios to escape from these indignities. The memory of being “Mexican” pursues them, so they go incognito. In suburbia they leave behind their Spanish names, Mejicano accents, and Indian hearts. Even their black hair acquires a protective coloring and grows lighter in the bright sunlamps of suburbia. Many are darker than black tar, But they pretend to be Anglo, They powder the back of their necks, In order to look lighter skinned.

Actually, few “Mexicans” live in the suburbs. They are mostly “Spanish.” Says a barrio lawyer, “I know of families who converted to ‘Italian,’ and even to ‘Greek.’ ” The warm countries of the warm

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blood; has any Mexican ever “passed” as German? Some Mexicans don’t care to speak The language their mothers taught them, And go about saying they are Spanish, And denying their country’s flag.

Hard-working and Anglicized, those who earn enough to move out of the barrios into the suburbs may be looked upon with envy and contempt by those who stay behind. They may look back with equal contempt and envy. They have a tenuous hold on the fringes of the middle class. One scion of a prominent Phoenix family, Joe Benitos, says of the precarious status of the middle-class Chicano in the suburbs, “He has to obey the unwritten rules. He can join the Kiwanis Club, but not the Country Club. He can eat dinner with his neighbor in a restaurant, but not in his neighbor’s house. And not with his whole family. If he makes one false move, one faux pas, he is snubbed off the cliff of Anglo acceptance with a pat on the back.” He is a marginal man in a social no man’s land, who can sit beside the pool but can’t go in the water. In the barrios they say contemptuously, “He is a Malinche! He is a vendido! ” Literally, he is a traitor; he has sold us out. Inferno, the newspaper of the San Antonio barrios, features a “Malinche of the Month.” One month it is a wealthy undertaker, and one month a successful politician who receives the award for having “made out.” Malinche was the Indian woman who became the concubine of Cortes. Her name has sorrow and compassion within it, for a woman held in bondage by her love for what enslaved her is a creature to be pitied as much as hated. The curse “Malinche!” is spoken that way. For are not the modern Mexicans all “the Sons of Malinche”? asks Octavio Paz. “Viva los Hijos de la Chingada! ” (The Sons of the Sacred Whore). One barrio leader says: “It is shameful. We work better with some¬ one from another ghetto—he may be black or white or green, it does not matter—than with one of our own people who has ‘made it.’ No one is more frightened, smug, and conservative, and harder on our people, than the typical schoolteacher or shopkeeper who has escaped

In the Suburbs of the Spanish Myths |

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from the barrios in a two-car port and king-sized bed.” The contempt goes deeper than the social gap that divides the barrios from the suburbs. It comes from the history of old Mexico. In the colonial economy of that country the middle class was the ob¬ sequious and toadyish servant of the conquerors. In Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico the philosopher Samuel Ramos writes: “Middle class concepts of family, religion, morality, love, and so forth, conform to the European mold.” The Mexican petty bourgeois had few native traditions, but was imitative of the foreign colonialists; and this divisiveness crossed the border with the emigrants. “If you have a civil war between the blacks and whites, we will have a civil war between the Chicanos and Malinches,” says a Los Angeles Brown Beret. The judgment of Dr. Ernesto Galarza, of the “ideologues of afflu¬ ence,” as he calls the middle-class professionals, is not less severe: “In Mexico the elite has learned little from history. The country is biding an explosion of social forces not unlike the tumultuous revolution of 1910. Yet the elite are as insensitive to this as they were in 1909. Is this applicable to the United States? Our elite has been just as insensi¬ tive. Little has changed or been learned by the ideologues of affluence in the last sixty years in the Southwest either. Perhaps they are too self-centered. Or stupid.” “Mexico’s middle class, like the Chicanos’ middle class in the U.S., is a sham,” says Luis Valdez of El Teatro Campesino, “the product of brainwashing and easy accommodation to the patron's culture, for individual gain.” It is the “refuge of hypocrites.” However servile its role in the colonial world, the middle class of Mexico had a place in that world. The baroque furniture in their homes, heavy as carved stones, was a sign of the secure and immobile status they had in that society. In the barrios of the United States the Chicano middle class has no such secure place. In this country, where the middle class reigns with success and largesse, the insignificant numbers of Chicanos who “make it” to the suburbs are marginal men to both communities—their own and the Anglos’. Of the national minorities in the country, none but the American Indians have a less

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influential and more provincial middle class than does La Raza in the Southwest. Even the blacks in the northern ghettos have proportion¬ ately more professionals than do the Chicanos. The Census of 1960 showed a mere 4.6 per cent of the Chicanos were professionals, com¬ pared with 15.1 per cent of the Anglos; while in all white-collar jobs (professional, managerial, proprietors, sales, and clerical), nearly half, 46.8 per cent, of the Anglos, but only 19 per cent of the Chicanos, had entered that tight, white circle. Chicanos were crowded into the professions traditionally open to them—teaching, law enforcement, and small shopkeeping. In the prestige fields—like the sciences, the legal and medical professions, and the executive offices—they were few. The old elite are even fewer. Like the faded but discriminating aristocrats of any ruling clique in a mass society, their numbers dimin¬ ish and their influence grows more fragile with every generation. Yet they are durable. It is comforting to see a daughter of the aristocracy in a War on Poverty office. The cheerful face of the matronly Mrs. Mildred Ser¬ rano is at ease amid the lean, agitated young men and women in the barrios of the poor. “Some of them are militants,” she says disapprov¬ ingly, but with a mother’s sigh. “They all call me Mom. I watch them like a mother. Perhaps I am like the mother of the family.” Mrs. Serrano works in the barrios of Fresno, one of the poorest of the communities of campesinos in the farm valleys of California. The sparse house, the hungry children, the stinking outhouses may dismay her, but she believes the successful of La Raza owe a debt to the poorest. “Our people now need everyone’s help. We are a big family.” Her philosophy has a New England simplicity. “If there is a little group of Mejicanos who need help, we help them. We teach them to help themselves. If a street has no street lights, we help get street lights. If there are no mail boxes, we help get mail boxes where the postman never came. If there are no sewers, we help get sewers.” Her demeanor would be appropriate at a lawn party, or at a diplo¬ matic dinner. In the barrios of the poor, amid hunger and disease, her gentility seems out of place. It is unimaginable that she say an unkind word, for if something has angered her she says, “I better not speak of it.”

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“Our descendants date back to before 1776, to the expedition of de Anza. I am a native Californian. I am really Spanish, I suppose. But my ancestors came from Sonora in Mexico, so I consider myself to be Mexican.” Her work in the barrios has taught her humility, she says. “When you work with humble people, and these are humble people, you have to learn to humble yourself a little.” It is not charity work she does, but she is charitable. “I do not put myself above them,” she says of the poor. Her concern for the poor “isn’t something the War on Poverty thought up. We have always taken care of our own.” Mrs. Serrano has pride in her heritage and a disdain for the “uncultured, self-centeredness” of the Anglo newcomers “who think they are our saviors.” “The Spanish-speaking can help themselves. Hasn’t that always been the philosophy of our Community Service Organization? It has. We are simply using our own philosophy in these ‘new’ programs. My husband and I are charter members of the Community Service Organi¬ zation, you know.” Of the civic moralities of the middle class of La Raza in California, none are more highly organized than those of the Community Service Organization (CSO). It was founded in the optimistic years of the late forties “to guard and further our democratic rights; to become more aware of our responsibilities as citizens; to better discharge our civic duty,” as the constitution of the Fresno CSO chapter declares, “to the promotion of the general welfare in the Spanish-speaking neighbor¬ hoods.” In the lexicon of the CSO, this has meant everything from the Back Alley Project for the “beautification of the barrios” by the planting of 168 trees on a slum street in East Los Angeles in the tense summer of 1968—leafy “green power,” the CSO called it—to the “nonparti¬ san” voters’ registration drive that registered 137,000 La Raza voters who promptly voted, albeit not quite nonpartisanly: 95 per cent for John F. Kennedy in the summer of 1960. The “kid-glove approach of our nice ladies,” says one young activist. “If they want to go to the political side, there is the Mexican American Political Association,” says Mrs. Serrano, “and those other groups.” Mostly it is the cautious virtues that have been promoted by the

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CSO. Save Your Money. Join Our Community Credit Union. Invest Wisely. Count Your Pennies. Join Our Buyers Club: Meat is sold at a five per cent markup. Group Insurance: At one-eighth the regular rate. Classes in How to Pass Job Applications. The beginnings of the CSO are usually traced to the manipulations of the pioneer of nonviolent confrontation politics—Saul Alinsky. His Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago, and especially his lean, apostolic, and selfless West Coast organizer, Fred Ross, are described as the guiding spirits of its creation. CSO’s founders deny the infer¬ ence that outsiders led them. In his office in Washington, D.C., one of the founders, the graying, eloquently voiced Congressman Eduardo Roybal of East Los Angeles, reminisces about the early days. He personally called the first meeting of the CSO, he says. As he remembers it, puffing on his pipe to draw out the memory, “It was in 1947. That was when I first decided to run for the City Council in Los Angeles.” Since 1881, no Mexican Ameri¬ can had been on the City Council. But in 1946, a La Raza leader was elected city councilman in Chino, California, and that generated a flurry of political optimism and activity. “We lost that year. Some of us decided what we needed was a community group. The CSO was it. We thought of it and we organized it. Of course the others helped. But we did it.” Mrs. Ursula Rios Gutierrez, a director of the East Los Angeles CSO, whose brother Anthony Rios was one of its founders, agrees: “It was the campaigners for Roybal who began the CSO; Roybal, Rios, about ten of them. Fred Ross helped, but he didn’t organize it. History organized it.” It grew out of World War II. “The war was the catalyst,” says Congressman Roybal. “Why, at the original meeting there were only war veterans—ten war veterans. Someone said, ‘This isn’t just for veterans. This is for everybody.’ At the meeting after that we brought our wives. That made twenty of us instead of ten.” Even the bringing of wives to an all-male veterans group was something new. The experiences of World War II had taught the Chicanos to con¬ front the Anglo prejudices directly and defend their identity, rather than cower. “In the army I was assigned to a barracks full of Texans,” Roybal recalls. “One of them woke up every morning and cursed

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Mexicans in general. Then one day he cursed me. So, I turned around and socked him. I knocked him out. That ended the argument right there. Most of us in the service had experiences like that. And then on the battlefield, every man was equal, of course. Death does not discriminate. So we were caught between the bigotry and the officers who wanted none of it. Not because they loved us, but because they wanted things to run smoothly. It dawned on some of us for the first time that the Anglos were divided. And if we united, we could win concessions.” After World War II, the middle class of La Raza used the CSO as a political lever. Roybal was elected. But then social rigidity returned. “In California they put a ceiling on La Raza,” says one of the younger Chicano leaders, Alex Mercure. “You can elect so many, no more. You can earn so much, no more.” The CSO stagnated in frustration. For twenty years the CSO held to its innovative yet cautious course. It sometimes showed boldness, but always tempered it with politeness, virtues that are ridiculed by the barrio’s activists. “The CSO is a middle-class bag,” says a Brown Beret. “It’s O.K., but it’s too Malinche.” Lately its membership has fallen, from 12,000 in 1960 to 4,000 in 1968. “Our members are the older people mostly,” Mrs. Gutierrez says of the East Los Angeles chapter; the CSO doesn’t have “the people of the streets.” In the suburban barrios of Texas the United League of United Latin American Citizens (lulac) has suffered a like denouement. Founded in the wake of the racist outburst of the Ku Klux Klan that swept through Texas in the aftermath of World War I, lulac began with a proclamation of self-defensive patriotism. Its constitution emphasized the obvious: “Section 1. As loyal citizens of the United States of America: We believe in the democratic principle of individual political and religious freedom.” A few years before its founding in February, 1929, the Klan had held sway over much of east Texas. The then wholly Democratic state had gone to Herbert Hoover in the presiden¬ tial elections because of the Klan’s hatred of the Catholic “papist” A1 Smith. “We had to adopt a euphemism and call ourselves a ‘League of United Latin American Citizens.’ Simply because ‘Mexican,’ or even ‘Mexican American,’ was not in vogue,” says Dr. George San¬ chez, a former national president of lulac.

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The lulac pledge of loyalty was meant to soothe the anti-Mexican jitters that had bedeviled Texans ever since the time of Pancho Villa. Hysteria had reigned in the Southwest. It was then that the age-old name Espanoles Mejicanos—Mexican Spaniards—by which the peo¬ ple had referred to themselves for centuries, was replaced with the innocuous and much safer Spanish Americans, or Latin Americans. One early president of lulac in 1932 voiced the social pressures of the time when he described the group’s goals as encouraging “peo¬ ple of Mexican descent now residing in Texas to assimilate as rapidly as possible.” The lawn parties. Red Cross teas, barbecues in the Texas style, mariachi bands in the Army Day Parade, crowning of a Mexican beauty queen on Columbus Day, and annual baseball game against the Pan American Optimist Club, for which lulac became known, were an attempt by its middle-class leadership to appease the blatant racism then prevalent against Mexicans and to secure peace for the barrios. Influenced by the “Four Freedoms” of World War II, lulac, in 1944, enlarged its goals: “We solemnly declare ... a sincere and respectful reverence for our racial origin, of which we are proud.” So dedicated, the dentists and shopkeepers were henceforth to “eradicate discrimination . . . seek equal protection under the law . . . political unification . . . participate in all local, state and national political contests.” Lulac, in thirty years, became a civil rights organization. But old habits die slowly. One of the offspring of lulac, the League of Loyal Americans of San Antonio, dedicated itself as well to “benevolent, charitable and educational undertakings” in the barrios. In demonstrating their intent, the Loyal Americans launched a drive “to clean up the red-light district” frequented by the soldiers at Fort Sam Houston. These civic moralities were usually financed by en¬ chilada dinners and fiestas in the local high school gyms. “The enchilada dinner is the high point of their activity,” says Fecundo Valdes, of lulac. “They are afraid to rock the boat. They play it safe. They are polite. They are so conservative that they are out of sight.” And yet the older leadership, Knights of America and Sons of America, that united to form lulac had driven the Ku Klux Klan out of south Texas in the early twenties. More recently lulac has en-

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dorsed many of the demands of the new movements of Chicanos and campesinos. “So lulac is not militant or political,” says George Sanchez, the former national president of lulac; but, he added, “Don’t make this a purely social club where we pat each other on the back, you know, and have a cocktail. I hope it’s more than that.” “We are beginning to be proud of the things our people have done. As Indians, yes. As Spaniards also.” Dr. Sanchez tells a lulac Club of the middle class of El Paso: “I am very proud that I am part Indian. All of you, almost without exception, are part Indian. Wonderful! Something to be proud of! Something to point to and say, ‘Soy Indio ’ [I am Indian], as they used to say in Mexico just after the Revolution. Most of us can say that: ‘Soy Indio. Soy Mejicano. ’ We have too often tried to suppress our ‘Mexicanity.’ To deny our traditions. We need to reverse that trend. We are not doing that. We are letting people lead us around places here, places there. I, for one, am not going to be placed except insofar as I place myself.” He is a salty-tongued, aging, and indestructible advocate of La Raza. A teacher for forty-five years, Dr. George Sanchez (his doctor¬ ate is in education) has most recently been director of the Center for International Education at the University of Texas, where he was Chairman of the Department of History and Philosophy of Education. One of the distinguished scholars of La Raza, he has grown weary, he says, of “lost battles.” “See these gray hairs, these scars? They come from calling a spade a spade. And telling the politicians—from LBJ down—‘We’re tired of talk. We’re tired of promises.’ Let’s tell LBJ that. Let’s tell Governor Connally that. He says, ‘Oh, I love my Latin Americans. I was raised with them down in Florisville.’ Stuff! I could use a harsher word. Stuff! I don’t want pretty words. Put it on the line. Deliver. Then I will judge if you are my friend or not. Not by your la via. Your short talk. Your palaver. “O.K. You are going to get your head bloodied. It’s going to cost you money. But what is blood and what is money compared with this sense of pride, the sense of potency, cultural potency? We have it. And we share it. What are we waiting for? Someone to put us on the WPA?

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Or the Peace Corps? Excellent undertakings. I’m for them. But are we waiting for a handout of some kind? Go and take it! It’s yours. Your potency!” Not every member of the old elite or new middle class reflects the same surety and confidence that George Sanchez does. In private, there are troubled voices among the waning aristocrats and perplexed businessmen. Of all the social events of the gentry, gente de razon, the people of reason, of the Southwest, few are older and more traditional than the Fiesta de Taos. Every year, for generations, the local elite of that historic town gather at a costume ball held to commemorate the founding of the ancient Spanish settlement in the 1540’s. The Kiwanis Club of Taos sponsors that centuries-old costume ball in the summer of 1967. Elegantly gowned women with but the faintest hint of Mexican ancestry in their faces, the shopkeepers of the plaza, together with a handful of landowners and mine owners who don red sashes and ruffled blouses for the festivities, dance and drink the night away. In the Katchina Motel, opposite the Esso Station, these mem¬ bers of the Hispano bourgeois and remnants of the “old families” dance the old rancheras and fandangos. The “Latin” band, which is neither Mexican nor Anglo, has some difficulty playing the music. Its style is that of the bland “Latin” rhythms of the night clubs. An old man requests a traditional Hispano dance. “Well,” the band leader says apologetically, “I don’t think we can play that real pretty. But we will try, folks.” He doesn’t succeed. Looking like a venerable patron, the old man who asks for the dance leads a young girl onto the dance floor. He sets his own tempo, with intricate two-steps, yelling “Bravo!” to the faltering band out of polite¬ ness. ‘ At one table the family of a mine owner sits quietly laughing and drinking. The decorum is abruptly shattered by the appearance of a young man in cowboy boots, shirt, and hat. He is very drunk. Un¬ steadily he makes his way through the dancers to the family table. He is a scion of the town aristocracy. The mines? He has no interest in that boring subject. “I don’t know what they use the ore for,” he mutters. After all, it was his great-grandfather’s land. The mine owner is just an uncle.

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“I’ve been stood up,” the cowboy says, sitting down. He is shamed before his relatives. “You’re drunk,” says his aunt. Contemplating her disapproval, the young man says in self-defense, “Ah, this is a cruddy, dirty, nothing town.” His aunt says in Spanish, “It’s home.” “I’m going away.” “Where will you go? This is the only decent place to live.” “I’m going away. After I have another drink, another dance, and another girl. Then I’m going in the morning. If I ever sober up.” “You’re dirty,” his aunt says. “I’m honest. We are all dead here. We don’t even know it. I know it.”

XIV

The Secret Politicians

Under the desert palms of the Imperial Valley, politics is a surrealist fantasy. The sour and sweet wind of twilight rises from the irrigated fields of the Mojave. The hot wind singes the town. It is 120 degrees on Main Street. No one is on the sidewalk. Somewhere in the town there is to be a secret meeting of the Mexican American Political Association. I have been invited by the former mayor of a border town, but I cannot find any sign of life in the County Building, where the meeting is to be. On the back stairs, behind the building, there is a dim light. Every¬ thing else is in darkness. In the desert town that afternoon I asked an official in the County Building for information about the meeting. “What meeting?” he says. He has never heard of the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA), he says, though MAPA is known throughout the state as the most influential electoral group of the two million California Mexi¬ cans. Known everywhere, that is, but in Imperial Valley. The poor of the barrios are 35 per cent of the county’s population and the saviors of its quarter-of-a-billion-dollar agricultural crops. But the official feigns ignorance of any political activity of La Raza. “You mean to say the Mexes are going in for voting?” He grins.

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I climb the back stairs and knock. The former mayor comes out of the shadowy corridor to greet me. He ushers me into the back room, where two city councilmen and several respected civic leaders—all Chicanos—are seated quietly about a conference table talking of com¬ munity affairs in hushed voices, like thieves. Businessmen, lawyers, and city officials, they are not conspirators indulging in nefarious schemes but are discussing hospital conditions, water and tax rates, community centers, and voter registration. The Imperial Valley MAP A is an eminently proper and middle-class group whose propriety is seen in the ties and white shirts these men wear in the desert heat. No one has mud on his shoes. Later, when I describe the surrealist meeting to Bert Corona, the imposing and powerful then state president of MAPA, he is not sur¬ prised nor outraged. “The story of our life. Many of our political leaders do not want to make their activities too well known to the Anglo. In these towns the Anglo leadership is often very conservative. They are in control. They could prepare all sorts of traps for us, extract tribute, have our people fired. Mexican Americans who work for government agencies, who are teachers, could be penalized in their personal lives and careers. It happens. “Our people have learned after many years of hard experience to stay as far underground as possible—underground not because they are doing something illegal, but to keep their deliberations and strategy to themselves. So this kind of situation does not amaze me. It has to be so. Neither does the fact that the Anglo leadership said they did not know about it. Many of the elected leaders of a commu¬ nity do not want to know about Mexican political organization or power. They have ruled it out of their minds. They do not want to recognize that we exist. “We are quietly organizing. We have not taken on the power struc¬ ture yet,” says Corona. Everywhere in the Southwest the secret politicians of La Raza meet in the suburban barrios. The underground is often rather highly placed. When the quiet and hard campaigning of these political leaders becomes visible, the outside society is stunned and, at times, uncom¬ prehending.

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“Who are the local Mexican political leaders?” I say to an Anglo official in Crystal City, Texas. “I don’t rightly know,” he says. “How about the Democratic and Republican party leaders,” I say. “You know, the Chicanos.” “I don’t rightly know who they might be.” “You don’t know the party leaders in town?” “I can’t rightly say.” The people of Crystal City, Texas, where 85 per cent of the inhabi¬ tants are Mexican Americans, had elected a city government of Chica¬ nos a few years ago. Since the “Conquest” of 1846, few urban groups of La Raza had won so sweeping a victory. The election had startled the Chicanos and upset the balance of apathy in Texas. Paul Matta, a young teacher who was elected mayor in 1968, has called this “the political coming of age” of his people. Nothing has changed to the Anglos. They visibly ignore the pres¬ ence of the new mayor. When I visit the City Hall of Crystal City to see Mayor Matta, I am told by a white official, “Oh, he just comes in to sign checks,” wouldn’t I rather talk to the city manager? He, it seems, is not a Mexican. When I ask Mayor Matta what the duties of his office are, he nods. “I sign the checks and I sign the municipal authorizations. And I lead all the official functions—you know, like parades and things like that.” Even the elected leader of La Raza is largely invisible to his col¬ leagues. He has long been a singular and lonely figure, for there is no national minority in the United States that has had less voice in the halls of government, or fewer elected officials. It is an old tradition of undemocratic representation in the Southwest that still prevails. Pro¬ portionate to the population there ought to be at least fifteen, and possibly twenty, Chicanos in Congress. There are four: Congressmen Henry Gonzalez and Eligio de la Garza of Texas, Manuel Lujan of New Mexico, and Eduardo Roybal of California. And this is the largest number of lawmakers that has ever come from the barrios. There is no major city in the Southwest with a Chicano mayor, despite the large barrio populations of Phoenix, San Diego, El Paso, San Antonio, Albuquerque, Denver, Fresno, and Los Angeles. There

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is not one state with a Chicano governor. There is but one U.S. Senator, Joseph Montoya of New Mexico, where the tradition insists on a cultural split of the state’s senatorial ticket into hyphenated politics. La Raza’s numerical strength ought to elect 10 to 20 per cent of the legislatures of the Southwest. Instead the representation ranges from no per cent to a high of one per cent. In San Antonio, Texas, where La Raza represents 40 per cent of the city’s population, only two of the nine city councilmen come from the barrios. So unrepresentative is the local government that Dr. Bill Crane, Chairman of the Department of Government at St. Mary’s University, has dubbed it “San Antonio: Pluralistic City and Mono¬ lithic Government”; while County Commissioner Albert Pena, Jr., has denounced the “undemocratic, decadent, and dangerous” political machine that runs the city. In El Paso, where La Raza comprises 45 per cent of the population, there is an equal imbalance. Houston, Phoenix, Tucson, and Denver have but token representation. Los Angeles has none at all. The barrios of Los Angeles, with a population that is said to be approaching one million, have not a single Chicano representing them on the City Council. Election districts are so gerrymandered that it takes almost two votes in East Los Angeles for every one vote in West Los Angeles to elect a councilman. Worst of the farcical corridas de toros of elections without represen¬ tation occurs in California. In the zany atmosphere of the state’s political circuses, the rigid exclusion of La Raza from the most mini¬ mal participation in government seems incredible. There may be two million Mexican Americans in California, but there was not one Mexi¬ can American in either house of the state legislature in 1968. Although La Raza is 10 per cent or more of the population less than 10,000 of the 249,000 federal employees in California, in 1967, were Chicanos. Where there are large La Raza concentrations the invisibil¬ ity is most glaring. Fresno has a barrio population that is one-fifth of the city; but “not one Chicano has been appointed to anything of significance in Fresno,” says Gilberto Lopez, a lawyer who heads the city’s MAPA chapter. “In Fresno County, to give you an example.

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there is only one highway patrolman who is Mexican.” “As a people we are still very isolated,” in Bert Corona’s words, “isolated for two reasons: Our inclination to be politically isolated, and the rejection by the Anglo community—which you might say is discrimination or racial separation.” The isolation is recognized by political scientists, who nevertheless challenge the charge that racial discrimination is the primary cause. Robert W. Glascow, an editor of the Phoenix, Arizona, Republic, sums up the majority attitude in Urban Politics in the Southwest by saying, “The Mexican American until now has been passive, if not apathetic, politically.” The recognition of La Raza’s own political viewpoint has been so insignificant that Lawrence Fuchs, a professor of American Civiliza¬ tion and Politics at Brandeis University and the editor of American Ethnic Politics, all but ignores the Mexican Americans as an ethnic group: “Of all the so-called ‘minority groups’ only Afro-Americans (and a much smaller number of American Indians and first-generation Orientals) . . . were excluded systematically from politics,” Fuchs writes in his introduction. There is no chapter on La Raza in American Ethnic Politics.

La Raza has been excluded from politics as effectively at the polls as it has in the textbooks. In San Patricio County, a fiefdom of ranch¬ ing dynasties north of Corpus Christi, a newly elected city commis¬ sioner of the town, Manuel Chavez, tells the Texas Advisory Committee of the United States Civil Rights Commission that “intimi¬ dation and other acts by election officials, police, welfare officials and employers [are] designed to reduce the turnout of Latin American voters.” The commissioner itemizes his charges: \

1. Welfare recipients were warned that they might be dropped from welfare rolls if seen in the ‘wrong place’ on election day; 2. Surplus food commodities were curtailed two or three weeks prior to the election; 3. There was harassment by police, including the ticketing of cars for minor mechanical defects on election day; 4. There were attempts by voting officials to confuse voters by implying that there were property qualifications for voting; 5. There were no voting booths as required by law and people were forced to vote in full view of others;

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6. There were difficulties in getting people registered; 7. Attempts were made to take field workers to the fields early on elec¬ tion day to prevent them from voting.

Of such elections, fought in stifling hostility and enforced isolation, the La Raza politicians who have been elected are understandably wary. They have been few in number and they have had haphazard political support. Bert Corona has lamented these elections as “mave¬ rick accidents.” Legislatively they have had little power, and too often their function is to parade before the electorate as “showpieces.” Rodolfo Gonzales has contemptuously said of his own career as the upcoming Chicano of Colorado politics, “They thought they owned me. I was their showpiece.” It is the sort of success “that ruins a good man and corrupts a bad one,” says Commissioner Albert Pena of Texas. Until recently, the highest-placed La Raza politician was Eduardo Perez, the secretary of the State Committee of the Democratic Party of California, in the administration of Governor Edmund Brown. Perez says of his ranking position, “I don’t do a damn thing. They sign my name to every letter they send out. They even give me a real Mexican name, Eduardo Perez. It’s something! They wanted me to become Americanized, so they said, ‘Change your name to Eddie!’ So I did. Now it is more romantic to be named Eduardo again. So they changed my name back. They don’t tell me what’s going on. I am left out of their planning sessions, out of everything. “Oh, I get an honor every time we’re having an Executive Board meeting. I get to read the roll. That’s it. It’s tokenism.” “It is true we have one member of La Raza in. most city halls and on almost all boards. This is just window dressing,” says Fecundo Valdez of New Mexico politics. “Most of our political figures are not politically free. Most of our leaders have participated in illusory deci¬ sion making, but never where the real decisions are made. Hence, whenever real leadership has emerged, it has always been siphoned off, or bought off, or silenced. They become regular turncoats.” Leaders who do not lead and politicians kept from political power may take refuge in rhetoric, verbal eloquence, the prestige of office, or the mannerisms of a patron. The “leaders who are concerned about their own image,” as Bert Corona says, are such men. The older

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generation of politicians fought their way to acceptance when the barrios were weak, ignored, and disunited. It was not until the late twenties that the League of United Latin American Citizens (lulac) was founded, and the Community Service Organization (CSO) did not begin political activity until the late forties. Both these groups were remote from the barrio masses, were “not political,” as Dr. George Sanchez has said. These were the most active barrio organizations for two generations. It was an era of “political impotence,” says John Burma in Spanish-Speaking Groups in the United States. “On the whole, the Mexicans and Mexican Americans ... were of little politi¬ cal significance before 1945.” But for the abortive attempt to establish the Congress of Spanish Speaking People in the late thirties, no lasting political breakthrough was made outside the barrios. When Eduardo Roybal was elected to the House of Representatives from East Los Angeles in the 1950’s, no Chicano—outside of New Mexico—was serving in the United States Congress. If a man was to be elected, he had to be chosen by non-La Raza politicians and often by anti-La Raza politicians. The unique style of barrio leadership had to be disguised. Success in politics required subservience to the established party machinery “downtown,” the imitation of its methods, and the espousing of the Anglo campaign styles. The “La Raza politico was castrated by the Anglo niceties,” says a younger leader. “He was Anglicized. He lost his balls.” El Gallo of Denver calls such a barrio leader “the Green Tfo Tomas” (Uncle Tom), not unaffectionately and a little sadly. “This is the man who was our leader when the gringo ‘picked’ our leader. But he’s not our leader now. He’s green with envy.” Then there is “the Grey Tio Tomas—he is neither brown nor white. He picks up some¬ thing in the Chicano neighborhood and takes it downtown. Then he gets something from the power structure and brings it back to the Chicanos. He is neither hot nor cold—and he means no good to either side.” In the barrios of East Los Angeles a roomful of community people who are active in local politics discuss the old styles of leadership. They argue about these traditional politicos: Man: “Let us discuss about leadership. What kind of leadership have we had in the past?”

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Woman: “Ineffective! To a certain degree I think they were igno¬ rant. Not now so much as they were before.” Man: “A leader thinks, sometimes, the people are ignorant.” Second man: “You know, he thinks we can be led like sheep. You know, he is very dominant.” Third man: “The old, traditional leader seems satisfied to maintain the status quo. In other words, ‘Don’t rock the boat! We never had it so good! Let’s keep things the way they are!’ ” Second man: “In the past the traditional leaders have failed to mobilize the community. That’s why we have no representation in the field of politics.” Woman: “Like a mother who has a bunch of kids who she never taught how to iron, wash dishes, clean house, and they get to being fifteen, the poor kids don’t know how to do anything. She robbed them of their ability to do things. This is how the traditional leader is. There are a lot of Mexican men like that.” Man: “I wouldn’t call him a traditional leader. I would call him a headman. Usually these guys are hand-picked by the power structure for other than ability, you know. These guys are in the in-crowd. They are not leaders.” Woman: “He is ineffective because he doesn’t understand the times are changing. He thinks our needs are still the same; consequently, he doesn’t affect the people—because they feel he doesn’t understand our needs. The people just go along with him and try to keep him appeased while they go out looking for someone else.” Man: “The leader with prestige, without any power.” Leaders who are not leaders, these men are elected to represent the barrios to the outside world, not to lead within the community. “We elect him every year,” says a barrio leader of a Congressman. “But we do not listen to him in between elections. He listens to us. He has no influence among the people.” The barrios are governed by leaders and laws of their own making. In every family, on every block, there is a leader who is listened to. He may simply be an old man, without any status in the neighborhood except the respect afforded him. Long life is an achievement that is valued highly; it earns him recognition as a man of wisdom. But not all old men are so respected. The qualities of the barrio leader are his

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tenderness, compassion, suffering, and manhood. He is the patron of the urban villagers. “The old Mr. Alvarado is such a man,” says Gonzalo Cano, the former director of the El Santo Nino Neighborhood House of the CYO in East Los Angeles, talking about a mythic barrio leader; “He may be a retired railroad worker, or a farm worker whose back is too bent to bend. He is poor; he has nothing of material value to his name. Yet everyone respects him and he respects himself. Here comes old Mr. Alvarado down the street in clothes that look as old as he is, with his hat, his urban sombrero, on his head, walking with the dignity of a Senator although he may be on welfare. “Every block has its old Mr. Alvarado,” says Cano. The urban patron of the barrio is like a village elder or tribal wise man. He has no power to enforce his words. He is not elected by the laws of politics of the outside society. Legally, he does not exist. People come to him, listen to him, and go away to do as they wish. He has no wealth or indebtedness by which to bind them to him as the landed patron did. “We are not a united group, but are more like a large family,” says Bert Corona. In barrio politics the entire family of the leader is often involved. Politics becomes a family affair, where loyalty to brother and cousin may outweigh party loyalty. “If you scratch beneath a political fight, you may draw family blood,” an Albuquerque Chicano politician says. In one Southwestern city there is a contest for the postmaster’s job. The mayor seeks the job of postmaster. He is supported by the Demo¬ cratic County Committee and the local Congressman. Opposing the mayor is the assistant postmaster, who has the support of the local Democratic Party Club. “Our town split apart,” says a councilman. “Is it a family fight?” I ask him. “They both have large families. Lots of in-laws that cannot be disregarded.” He smiles sheepishly. “Besides, the assistant postmaster is my brother.” Man is the wheel upon which the philosophy of La Raza politics turns. The leader does not talk to the people about their problems, nor

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do they judge him simply by his programs. He is a man first of all. People listen to him or not, depending on how they feel about him as a man. “He is one of us” or “He is a stranger to us,” they say. “What a stranger he has become to us. He is no longer the man he was. All he is interested in is politics,” a La Raza politician says of a Congressman he helped elect. “ ‘Politics’ remains a dirty word and accusation,” declares The New Mexican. The common feeling in the barrios is not that politics is corrupt, but that it is inhuman. Corruption is, after all, human, and the barrio voter tends to be tolerant of the leader who flamboyantly flaunts his ego. He may be admired for the buoyancy of “his style,” while the coldly efficient politician who has no feeling for the people is despised. In his discussion of the Hispanic style of politics, Salvador de Madariaga writes: “All the efforts of the political propagandists to make the Spaniard feel like a citizen have failed. He feels like a man —quoting Unamuno (the Spanish philosopher)—‘nothing less than a whole man.’ ” *, It is like this in the barrios. La Raza of Los Angeles voices this idea of politics in its slogan, “Viva la Causa Carnal!” (“Hurrah for the Cause of Man!”) “Carnal” in Spanish means the flesh, the sensual. The slogan really is “Hurrah for the Cause of Sensuality in Man!” In the mountain villages of New Mexico they say of Reies Tijerina: “I think he may be a faker. He is one real scoundrel. But what a man he is! He is macho! He is a real man.” “We have been waiting since 1846,” writes La Raza, “for real men.” The barrio newspaper hails “El Tigre” and “Corky,” Reies Tijerina and Rodolfo Gonzales, as “a new and militant type of leadership” that youth “admire and respect.” “Not since the days of Joaquin Murietta and Emiliano Zapata have the Mexican people, especially the younger generation, had leaders they can be proud of.” These men “have said and done things Chicanos have only mumbled and have said under their breath, but didn’t have the ‘Guts’ or the ‘Machismo’ to say out loud.” These men are real men: “They are both machos. ” The idea of the whole man has emerged from the barrios to enter the political arena. The young activists and Chicano politicians have clashed with the established, old-style leaders who have devoted a

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lifetime to learning how to subdue and sublimate their Chicanoismo, in order to be acceptable to the Anglos. “Many of our old-timers in MAPA are overcome with our so-called image,” says Bert Corona. “The young people say, ‘To hell with your image! What about the image of the hundreds of thousands of Spanish-speaking poor, the illiterate, the unemployed, and those who live in miserable housing?’ The older leadership in MAPA is being pushed by the younger peo¬ ple.” In New Mexico one of the younger generation, Alex Mercure, the director of the village help programs, sees a similar trend. “The undercurrent of the last ten or fifteen years in politics is that people are seeking a new kind of leader, an honest leader. Sincerity is what they want. They are tired of the jefe politico and the hypocritical politician. That’s why so many of the new leaders you see arising are not old-style politicians belonging to either of the two old parties. “The new political leaders tend to be nonpolitical. What party do they belong to? I think they are not geared to either political machine. They tend to be independent.” Where do the new leaders come from? In the East Los Angeles workshop on barrio politics the discussion leader, Mr. Chavarria, dates the change to World War II: “We were exposed to experiences we had never experienced before. The veterans of World War II, who, because they went away, because they were in the army, because they went to foreign lands, because they had a variety of experiences, returned with ideas, with a perspective that was different from the one they had before. They even became concerned about politics! “The barrios had been changing, not only the young men had been changing. And this filtered down to his family. His children had been able to go to school. His children were now able to go to college. The individual did no longer grow up to just particular jobs he was going to hold. He began to choose the jobs he wanted. “Hence we began to see a new type of leader; the leader that wanted to displace the traditional leader; not only in political leadership. So the community is changed. We are still in a confusing stage. This kind of change is never clear. It is clear only in the books of the sociologists and economists and political scientists; but as we look around us these things are not very clear.

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“The new leader that issued from this cleavage, of World War II, he is a man who is no longer satisfied with the status quo. He sees our community in an entirely new way. He is a man who believes that things can be done, that he can mobilize our community, and he is going to do just that.” He is a man, a whole man. “He has huevos!” That is, “He has eggs! He has balls!” Rodolfo Gonzales, in resigning from his post as a district captain in the Democratic Party of Denver, evoked this idea of political macho. His political act was an act of his manhood, he wrote in an open letter to the county chairman: The individual who makes his way through the political muck of today’s world, and more so the minority representatives, suffers from such an immense loss of soul and dignity that the end results are as rewarding as a heart attack, castration, or cancer! ... You and your cohorts have been accomplices to the destruction of moral man in this society. I can only visualize your goal as complete emasculation of manhood, sterilization of human dignity, and that you not only consciously but purposely are creating a world of lackeys, political boot-lickers and prostitutes.

The secret politicians of La Raza were coming in from the cold of Anglo politics.

XV

Gracias por Nada

Wheezing and mustached, the deputy sheriff leans back in the rocker. He cocks his Stetson hat. “I don’t say that you can’t trust any of them. Just most!” he drawls. “Now, I’m not prejudiced to them. I worked beside them all my life.” He doesn’t say, some of my best friends are ..., but he says, “Why I even got a friend who’s a Texas Ranger.” He grins maliciously. “Of course, I won’t want my daughter to marry an Anglo!” The deputy sheriff is a Chicano. In the living room of a suburban home in a barrio in southwest Texas eight men sit around and plan an election campaign. Some of the group are county officials, astute students of the folkways of Texas politics whose expertise influenced the triumph of John F. Kennedy in the state, and the defeat of Lyndon Johnson’s candidates. Jokingly they refer to themselves as the “Mexican Mafia.” They have political power in the barrio, and they exercise it quietly, almost secretively. “Let’s run someone for mayor,” a man suggests. %

“We won’t win,” an old man—he must be seventy—interrupts him. When the patriarch of the men speaks, the younger men listen care¬ fully and argue diffidently. “Sometimes we win,” protests the man who made the suggestion.

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“The dogcatcher’s job!” the patriarch admonishes him. “We win the fleas. Until we have a real two-party system in Texas we will never win control. I mean a real two-party system.” “Aren’t you a Democrat?” “My whole life.” “You vote for the Democrats?” “Sometimes.” “You don’t trust the Democrats, though?” “No.” “Or the Republicans?” “No.” “When you say ‘a real two-party system,’ do you mean Democrats and Republicans?” I ask the cagey old man. “Or do you mean Mexican and Anglo parties?” The old man’s eyes brighten. He says nothing for a while. “Well?” “Yes.” He smiles. “I mean a real two-party system.” The upheaval in barrio politics reflects a striving for self-determina¬ tion. In the most obscure town and quiet valleys of the Southwest there are new and independent Chicano movements being formed, to free the La Raza voter from tutelage to two Anglo-run parties. In the Rio Grande Valley of Texas a La Raza “Independent Party” enters the county elections for the first time and to everyone’s surprise wins several seats. “Community candidates” run for local office in the suburban barrios of Los Angeles, and lose. In San Antonio a “barrio slate” of young Chicanos brashly enters the mayoralty race, while the Crusade for Justice caudillo, Rodolfo Gonzales, runs for mayor of Denver on a few weeks’ notice and wins several thousand votes for his “La Raza Revolution.” High in the mountain villages of New Mexico the land-grant heirs are becoming politically independent. Reies Tijerina is a gubernatorial candidate. When he is ruled off the ballot he is replaced by a Pueblo Indian, Jose Alfredo Maestas. He is the first Indian since 1837 to seek the governorship of the state, with Hispano support. Even in the remote little towns of the San Luis Valley, in the Southern Rockies of Colorado, there is talk of a “Peo¬ ple’s party.”

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The attempts to create “a La Raza style of politics” are more sym¬ bolic than successful. Most of these fledgling efforts are enthusiastic fiascos; the voters are skeptical. In the past the barrio voter was taken for granted on election day and ignored thereafter. He was a “safe” and “captive” voter. He voted, if and when he voted, in political segregation, for the memories of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, on a straight Democratic ticket. The barrios turned out “up to 97 per cent for the Democrats,” estimates Bert Corona, the past State Chairman of the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA). Election districts from California to Texas, where there were a majority of La Raza voters, in campaigns of 1956, 1958, 1960, 1962, and 1964, show a remarkably consistent vote for the Democratic Party ticket of 95 per cent—or higher. No group in the country has been as loyal to a single political party. Yet few voting blocks have had less political power or patronage. “We have been political whores,” says a highly placed Chicano politician in California. “Or, maybe, virgins!” “And what do we have to show for giving ourselves so freely? Nothing! So now we say no more. We will not be whores any more. We are no longer virgins. We are not so easily seduced by innocence or promises of politicians. “La Raza has to organize our own political power,” he says. “That’s the only way we’ll get the two parties, or anyone else, to listen to us, and give us what we demand.” When the county commissioner of Bexar County, Texas, Albert Pena, attended the Democratic Party National Convention, in I960, he was one of a handful of Chicanos. “Every group was represented except Mexican Americans,” he recalls. The Chicano was unknown then, on the national political scene. He was supposed to stay in his provincial place, in the Southwest, and he did. The United States government had, after all, never had a single agency, or department, devoted specifically to the needs of La Raza, in all the years since the War Against Mexico, in 1846. Rarely did the two major parties bother to mention the Chicanos in their presidential platforms. The lonely La Raza leader tried unsuccessfully to interest the party

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politicians in the anguish of the barrios. Pena testified before the Minorities Committee, headed by G. Mennen Williams, then gover¬ nor of Michigan. “The governor was genial,” he recalls. “He listened carefully. And then he told me he had ‘never heard of Mexican American problems before. “I told him that Mexicans had always voted Democratic. We were considered to be in the hip pocket of the Democratic party. But we were getting fed up. The day would come when we would be indepen¬ dent, I told him. It has come.” Viva Kennedy!—the barrio movement to help elect President John F. Kennedy—was begun soon after that. In Texas the state chairman was Albert Pena. “We did it on our own. We financed it ourselves. And we won Texas for the President when the political bosses dragged their heels,” Pena says. “We brought out the highest barrio vote in Texas history. The President recognized our work: the first Mexican federal judge was appointed—little enough, but a beginning. Then the President was assassinated, right here in Texas.' “It was as a result of Viva Kennedy! that we formed PASO. We were becoming independent of betrayal!” Paso is to Texas what MAP A is to California. It stands for Political Association of Spanish-Speaking Organizations; it stands as well for paso a paso—step by step. “We wanted to get all the Mexican Ameri¬ can political clubs together, so that we could manifest our own power,” Pena says. “We don’t want to belong to either party.” Still “political brokers” in Texas doubted that La Raza voters could organize their influence beyond the borders of their barrios, or that they could become an independent force with the “swing vote” in state elections. But then, in 1966, Waggoner Carr, the Attorney Gen¬ eral of Texas, ran for the Senate seat held by conservative Republican John Tower. The Democrat, Carr, had angered many Mexican Ameri¬ cans by his refusal to meet with the Rio Grande Valley farm workers who walked 491 miles to Austin to be told that Governor John Connally and the Attorney General were out of town. One lulac official in Texas was quoted as saying that Carr symbolized the sort of Demo¬ crats “who seem unaware of the poor housing and poor job opportuni¬ ties” in the barrios.

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There were quiet signs of a revolt in the barrios. In the Journal of the Harris County PASO a news clipping was reprinted when the Texas Attorney General held a press conference in the midst of Presi¬ dent Kennedy’s burial service at Arlington. “Waggoner Carr no sabe portarse con dignidad, ” read the message beside the news clipping, “La eleccion es en noviembre—no se olviden de los que nos insultan. ” (“Waggoner doesn’t know how to behave with dignity. The election is in November—we have not forgotten how you insulted us.”) On the last page of the paso Journal was the advertisement: “Congratulations paso! from Senator Tower,” who was photographed beside Father Antonio Gonzales, spiritual leader of the Valley Farm workers. When election day came, Tower defeated Carr by 198,718 votes. On the same ballot, Connally defeated Kennedy, the Republican can¬ didate, by 788,072 votes in the governor’s race. Half a million voters had switched parties from one line on the ballot to the next. These voters were mostly Mexicans, who had voted 95 per cent for the Democrats in the previous election; they now voted 35 per cent for the Republicans. Curiously there had been no perceptible change in party registrations. “We did it,” Pena says simply, “by crisscrossing political lines. A minority is more important if it is the swing vote.” Sam Goddard, the Governor of Arizona, known as a liberal Demo¬ crat and “friend of the poor,” was defeated in a close election by the slight shift of barrio voters, in the year of the Texas revolt. He was accused by some La Raza leaders of ignoring the housing needs of the Phoenix ghettos—one of the few major cities without a housing code requiring minimum building standards. In New Mexico the electoral revolt was even more dramatically explicit. The “Land of Enchantment” had a generations-old tradition of La Raza participation in Democratic administrations. But it was “window dressing,” Chicano leaders charged. Suddenly in 1966, for the first time in the state’s history, villages that had always voted up to 90 per cent for the Democrats switched just as heavily to the Republicans. They elected the maverick Republican David Cargo as Governor. On the same ticket, in village after village, the Hispanos voted for the local Democrats.

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The trend did not reach the West Coast that year, but the implica¬ tions were clear. California, with its two million Mexican Americans, would be strongly affected by any independent political movement in the barrios. In that divided state the La Raza voters could be decisive. Politicians of both parties would have to bargain equally for Chicano support—an incredible prospect in a state where there was not one Chicano in either house of the legislature in 1966. In Washington, D.C., the election results brought an immediate response. La Raza politicians, like Bert Corona, were summoned to the White House, where plans were discussed for a promised “White House Conference of Mexican Americans.” The outbursts of anger and frustration by Negro leaders at the previous conference on the black ghettos had, however, made certain officials of the Johnson administration hesitant. President Johnson was himself wary of focus¬ ing the national spotlight on the Chicano revolt. It was decided to convene a more manageable meeting, at a remote location, far from the nation’s capital. On June 9, 1967, the President announced the creation of The Inter-Agency Committee on Mexican American Affairs. Since there was no precedent, and no place, in the governmental structure for such a group, it had to be attached directly to the White House. The President then appointed Vincenti Ximines—a respected La Raza politician from New Mexico, and a Commissioner of the Equal Em¬ ployment Opportunities Commission—to chair the new agency com¬ posed of four Cabinet officers and the head of the OEO. The task of the Ximines Committee, by Presidential Order, was to “hear solutions to Mexican American problems.” Although the com¬ mittee had little authority and no enforcement powers, its creation was a recognition that the Chicanos would no longer be the “stepchil¬ dren of the Great Society,” in the words of Judge Alfred Hernandez, the past president of lulac. When it was learned that the more outspoken La Raza leaders were not to be invited to the proposed White House conference—Senator Ralph Yarborough (Democrat, of Texas) had requested that the Presi¬ dent invite the full spectrum of independent barrio leaders—the dis¬ pute flared so bitterly that the conference was postponed indefinitely.

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It was never held. Infuriated, the state leaders of California’s MAPA, lulac, CSO, the American GI Forum, and the Association of Mexi¬ can American Educators, in the spring of 1968, expressed their “frus¬ tration, disappointment, and impatience over the long delays, inaction and indecisiveness on the part of President Johnson and his White House staff in convening a national conference on the pressing and urgent needs of the 9,000,000 Mexican Americans and other Spanish¬ speaking people of our country.” They threatened to convene their own “grassroots White House Conference.” Hoping to placate the revolt in the barrios, the White House ordered the holding of “Cabinet Committee Hearings on Mexican American Affairs” in El Paso, Texas, in October, 1967. But these hearings merely institutionalized the rebellion. Leaders like Cesar Chavez, who were invited by the President, refused to attend. Leaders who were not invited, like Reies Tijerina, attended, but then set up a rival La Raza Unida conference in the nearby Church of the Sacred Heart. Leaders who were featured speak¬ ers at the White House meeting, like “the dean of Mexican American politics,” Dr. Ernesto Galarza, spoke at the La Raza Unida meeting as well. Leaders of the powerful MAPA of California voted to boycott the Cabinet Committee Hearings entirely, but its members were per¬ mitted to attend individually. “We have to learn to play the political game and beat the Anglo at it,” explained one of MAPA’s top officers. In the Church of the Sacred Heart the young Chicanos took over the pulpit. A bumper sticker that symbolized the rebellious spirit began to appear on the cars of the officially invited delegates; it read “La Raza Unida,” and showed a farmworker raising two rifles in his fist. The delegation of community leaders from Laredo, Texas, marched into El Pasoffiearing the sign: “today we protest, tomor¬ row REVOLUTION.”

“We are moving forward,” President Johnson told the El Paso meeting. The United Steel Workers Union leader, Maclovio Barraza, who heads the Southwest’s Council on Mexican American Affairs, responded directly to the President: “It is not enough! And it barely touches the many problems that beg attention. Our people are say¬ ing that before we shout ‘Viva Johnson,’ there better be a ‘Viva la

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Gente Mexicana’ (Long Live the Mexican People). Manana is too late.” “manana is here!” was a placard of the young Chicanos at the La

Raza Unida conference. The juxtaposition of humor and anger, irony and protest, connivance and idealism, was not just a political tactic but was part of the “unique style of La Raza politics” that was developing. “Gracias por Nada!” (Thanks for Nothing!), the slogan of the protest marchers in California, voiced the same quality of bitter joking. It reflected the mood of a bicultural people who are urban and rural, ancient and modern, Indian and Spanish, Mexican and American. “Brown humor,” said a Chicano organizer, “is deadly serious.” “Now, don’t forget we are a culture within a culture. We are contra¬ dictory and complex. We are a conquered people,” explains the MAPA leader, Bert Corona, a hard-eyed, toughened veteran of politi¬ cal in-fighting. He is a tall, imposing man with the demeanor of a governor, who is expert at practical politics and not given to romanti¬ cism. “We have our own life style in the barrio. We have our own culture, that we retain very strongly. You hear more and more talk about the uniqueness of the Chicano. He is not really an Englishspeaking, Anglo-cultured individual. He is more complex than that. Our own consciousness is coming into the consciousness of the nation. The President recognized this, and so have many of the Cabinet officers. Why? Because La Raza has begun to exhibit its own style and demand its own priorities in politics. “If by self-determination you mean the liberty to plan and act on our own programs, in our own way, this is what we want. We want self-determination, now!

/

“So we cannot be just ordinary Democrats,” says Corona, himself a leading Democrat, “or Republicans either, in the Anglo way. The political parties are just vehicles for our fight for self-determination. We are La Raza always.” His views are echoed by a prominent Republican, Joe Benitos of Phoenix, Arizona. Benitos, a young man who rose high in his state’s GOP ranks (“They babied me,” he says, “because they wanted the Mexican vote”), is just as ambivalent about party politics. “I’m not a Republican’s Republican, just as I won’t be a Democrat’s Democrat.

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Politics is only politics. My main concern is the Mexican American! La Raza! I’m a Mexican American, first.” In the tacky summer of 1968 the raucous Democratic and Republi¬ can presidential conventions pushed the newly declared indepen¬ dence of the La Raza politicians to an uncomfortable test. At both conventions the candidates and demands of the Chicano caucuses were ignored by the party leaders. Some of the barrio delegates talked of a dramatic walkout. The martyred Senator Robert Kennedy had been the emotional hero of barrio voters, and the jefes politicos knew that neither of the nominees would rally much support in their con¬ stituencies. When the ill-fated Chicago Convention of the Democrats nominated the effervescent Hubert Humphrey, who had been picketed at the El Paso meetings, the delegates from the California barrios stood on their chairs shouting, “No! No! No!” Soon after the nominating rituals had been performed the jefes politicos of MAPA met in Fresno, in their traditional, rubber-stamp “Endorsing Convention.” The barrio leaders voted, however, for the first time in their history, to reject the presidential candidates of both parties. In the balloting Richard Nixon received 3 votes, Hubert Hum¬ phrey received 32 votes, and 130 votes were cast for “no endorse¬ ment.” The political independence of La Raza was proclaimed, by three to one. “Neither party has given much to the Mexican American,” de¬ clared Aban (Abe) Tapia, the newly elected state chairman of MAPA, who replaced Bert Corona. La Raza, which had “the swing vote for national and state elections” in California, would therefore support neither. By withholding their support from both presidential candidates the barrio leaders would hurt the Democrats most obviously. The jefes politicos had been influential in the campaigns of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. “It’s time to hit the Democrats hard,” Corona said, knowing full well the effect of a “no endorsement” vote. “We would rather stay at home and sit on our hands and not campaign for those who are not for the Mexican Americans. We don’t have to beg those who come around with lip service,” Tapia agreed. The revolt at the polls had reached California, and it was to cost Hubert Humphrey victory in the state.

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The delegates proposed no alternative candidates or independent parties. Where could they go politically? “Our movement is changing from month to month,” says Eliezer Risco, editor of La Raza. “No one knows what political form it will take tomorrow. No one knows who the national leaders will be next year. All we know is that it will be our own. We will no longer take orders from anyone.” “Chicanos are not damn fools,” were Corona’s parting words. “At least, not any longer!”

XVI

The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa

The De-education Schools The boy waves his hand bashfully, and the teacher tells him to come to her desk. “Charles, what do you want?” “I have to go,” the boy whispers, in Spanish, “to the bathroom.” “Charles, speak English.” “I have to go,” the boy whispers a little louder, in Spanish, “to the bathroom.” “English!” the teacher rebukes him, growing impatient. “We speak English in school, Carlos,” she says in Spanish. “You ask in English, or sit down.”

*

The boy, who is maybe ten, and small, looks up at the teacher with the awe and fear that schoolchildren of his age have for authority. He does not know what to say or do. Suddenly his eyes light up with a mischievous thought. “If you don’t let me go to the bathroom,” the boy exclaims, in Spanish, “maybe I piss on your shoes.” Years later the grown man remembers the incident of his boyhood

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humiliation without smiling. In his village the schoolhouse was closed long ago, and the teacher is gone, but the conflict in the classroom is indelible in his memory. “That teacher, she did not like us,” he says. “She was a good teacher, but for forty years she did not let children speak Spanish in her classroom. She made us shamed.” And the man of fifty is angry, still. “Why did that teacher shame us? Spanish is a cultured language. It was here before English.” Children have been taught to forget the “foreign” ways of their fathers. Children have been cajoled, enticed, threatened, and punished for speaking Spanish. Children have been beaten. In one school in South Texas the children are forced to kneel in the playground and beg forgiveness for uttering a Spanish word. Some teachers have pupils who talk the forbidden language kneel before the entire class. A popular punishment is to have the offender stand facing the blackboard. Cesar Chavez, the farm workers’ leader, vividly recalls being forced to stand in a corner for defying the order, “No Spanish in the classroom.” That teaching method is still practiced in the rural schools. “Spanish detention” is another widely used punishment for speaking the native language. A wispy, white-haired teacher in Tuc¬ son, Arizona, proudly tells how she teaches English. The child who answers in Spanish walks to her desk and “he drops a penny in a bowl, for every Spanish word.” She boasts, “It works! They come from poor families, you know.” One Rio Grande Valley school goes further. The teachers assign students to be “Spanish monitors,” who guard its corridors, writing down the names of their fellow students who are heard speaking Spanish. The culprits are reprimanded or beaten. Not all the methods of de-educating the Chicanos to forget their native language are nonviolent. Some of the largest school systems in the Southwest still sanction the beating of recalcitrant children if they persist in being “Spanish-speaking.” Even now, the schoolchildren of Los Angeles may be “paddled” with the official approval of the Board of Educath l. When the barrio students walked out of the high s hools of East Los Angeles to protest what they called “racist educas >n,” one of their

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pleas was that, “corporal punishment, which is carried on in the East Los Angeles schools, should be abolished throughout the district.” The Los Angeles Times commented casually: “Corporal punishment is mostly in the form of paddling. . . . Authorization of corporal punishment at the discretion of school personnel is the board’s [Los Angeles Board of Education] policy.” The offhanded defense of “pad¬ dling” the Chicano high school students, by the second-largest school system in the country, was offered in the spring of 1968! “We are teaching these kids with psychological guns pointed at their heads,” angrily observed Sal Castro, a Los Angeles high school teacher. “If a kid speaks in Spanish, he is criticized. If a kid has a Mexican accent, he is ridiculed. If a kid talks back, in any language, he is arrested. If a kid wants to leave school, he is forced back. We have gun-point education. The school is a prison. “Education in the barrio doesn’t free the mind of the Chicano. It imprisons his mind,” the teacher said. One day that spring an honor student at the Sidney Lanier High School in San Antonio, Texas, was caught reciting his Spanish home¬ work aloud, in the school cafeteria. He was taken to the principal’s office and beaten with a paddle; there were several cases of young people being beaten for speaking Spanish. “Just a gentle whack or two does them good,” a teacher said. When the students complained about the paddling, they were threatened with the loss of their college schol¬ arships and suspended. In frustration there was talk of a school strike. A meeting was hastily held by the city’s Human Rights Commission in the hall of a local Catholic church, where the young Chicanos cited dozens of incidents of intimidation because they dared to talk in their mother tongue. Educators listened in silence. There were no denials; everyone knew that it had been this way for generations. Wasn’t it everywhere? In Texas it is illegal, according to Section 288 of the State Penal Code, for a teacher, principal, or school superintendent to teach or conduct school business in any language but English. Textbooks have to be in English. By custom the language restriction has been stridently ap¬ plied to the students as well. The “sons of Zapata” County Commissioner Albert Pena extrava-

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gantly praised the students: “Our generation didn’t have the courage to speak out. You are brave,” he told them. In the San Antonio high schools there were months of turmoil, meetings, student strikes, firings of teachers and even priests, newspa¬ per headlines, and charges of infiltration by “Castro-trained extrem¬ ists” before the high school students won the right to talk openly in their mother tongue. Until that triumph they had to whisper the language of Cervantes in the secrecy of the girls’ locker rooms and the boys’ urinals. It was so everywhere. Language is a vital teaching tool in the de¬ education process. The banning of Spanish in the classroom is not an arbitrary act of a callous teacher. In the metropolitan school systems and in the village schoolhouses the suppression of the Spanish lan¬ guage and the culture of La Raza reflects the de-education policy that has been dominant in the schools of the Southwest since the “Con¬ quest” of the region. In the small town of San Luis in the high niountains of southern Colorado the people are mostly Spanish-speaking. Yet, there too the native language was prohibited inside the school gate. “Until quite recently Spanish has been tacitly assumed to be an inferior language by nearly all of us,” writes a village teacher in San Luis, Alan Davis. “Its use has been forbidden in our classrooms, and on our playgrounds, until this month [February, 1969].” Of course, the teacher adds, “we offered no courses in Spanish.” The native language of the Chicano child was treated with colonial¬ ist disdain. His voice was muted. “English is the national language of the United States, but it is not a native or indigenous language. It is one of the colonial languages,” writes Dr. Vera John, in a comprehen¬ sive study of bilingualism in the schools of the Southwest. In a con¬ quered land the institutions of culture—theaters, books, libraries, academics—may be visibly suppressed. It is more difficult to eradicate the spoken word. Language then becomes the last resource of cultural survival. “If the language goes, the culture goes with it,” writes a scholar of La Raza. And so, in the schools there are bitter skirmishes over the spoken word. The children have become combatants. “They yell at our children in school, ‘Do not speak Spanish!’ You

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are a free man in the land of the free, but ‘Do not speak Spanish!’ English is the only language of freedom,” Reies Tijerina, the prophet of cultural revival, tells a meeting in a village schoolhouse. “It’s like the story of the man who took a bird from his cage, and set it free. But first he took the pair of scissors and clipped off its wings. “ ‘Fly! Fly!’ the man said. “The blue-eyed cat, the Anglo, came and ate the poor, helpless bird,” Tijerina says. In the “migrant schools” proposed by the state of California’s “mas¬ ter migrant plan,” the process of de-education by which a Chicano child is stripped of his culture is bluntly outlined. The “sample migrant school curriculum” is explicit: Physical education—English cultural games and activities . . . Creative arts and crafts—Introduction to English culture, music and song . . . Arithmetic—Concrete objects, English concept of arithmetic . . . Social Studies—Developing knowledge of characteristics of English cul¬ ture . . . Nowhere in the curriculum is there a word on the Indian, Spanish, and Mexican cultures of the Southwest. In all the classes the emphasis is upon the de-education of the Chicano child. He has to be de-educated before he can be re-educated—as “Eng¬ lish”? The “English” cultural games he is taught may be the old Aztec sports of basketball and handball; the “English” music and song, Western style, may have originated in the vaquero music and song of the old West; and the “English” concept of arithmetic may be based on the sophisticated mathematics of the scholars of ancient Mexico. But none of these origins is mentioned in the textbooks or the cur¬ riculum. Education of the Chicano is de-education, first of all. The language and culture of the Southwest are seen by his teachers as a prime hindrance to his progress, not only in learning English, but in “becoming an American.” In the better schools the ensuing conflict may be subtle, but in the poorer schools it is vulgar and cruel. “Schools try to brainwash the Chicanos,” says Maggie Alvarado, a student at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio. “They try to make

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us forget our history, to be ashamed of being Mexicans, of speaking Spanish. They succeed in making us feel empty, and angry, inside.” De-education is a difficult process. The culture of La Raza and the Spanish language were native to the country for hundreds of years before the coming of the Anglo to the Southwest; they are not easy to uproot. Every generation the attempt at de-education has to begin anew, for the conflict of cultures in the schools of the Southwest is an unending conflict between the conquered and the conqueror. Coloni¬ alism has usurped the purposes of education. The schools have been one of the most effective instruments of the “Conquest.” “It is safe to say that the school, more than barbed wire or the plowing up of the range, was responsible for the decline of the vaquero,” writes the venerable old cowboy and settler of California, Arnold Rojas. The “Yankee schoolmarm” was a more efficient conqueror of La Raza than the United States Army, Rojas writes. “The children did not have a chance.” A child goes to school to wonder. The school is where he enters the Anglo world with shy curiosity; it is a magical microcosm of society to him. The teacher is his sorcerer, a mother who is worldly-wise, knowing all sorts of facts and magic, powerful as the policeman, but human as an aunt or uncle. In the beginning that is how school seems to the child. He is lost at the thought that he cannot enter that wonderful world because he speaks the wrong language or is the wrong color. The child is proud of his father; he boasts of his barrio heritage. He doesn’t know that he is supposed to be “culturally deprived.” If the teacher ridicules the language of his father, his way of think¬ ing, the beliefs and behavior his mother taught him, the child is bewil¬ dered. He is told he must choose between being “American” or “Mexican.” It is no choice for him, for he is neither but is both. He will argue, or grow silent. Either way the child will be in conflict with the teacher. And his idyl of education is ended. The anguish of the child from the barrio who faces a “traumatic first day” in school has been depicted by Dr. Sabine Ulibarri, Professor of Spanish at the University of New Mexico. He told the Cabinet Com-

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mittee Hearings on Mexican American Affairs: “The child begins with a handicap the very first day he shows up in the first grade. English is the language of the classroom. He speaks no English, or he speaks inadequate English. He comes from a father-dominated home, and he finds himself in a female-dominated classroom. The Anglo concepts and values that govern and prevail are unintelligible to him. In all likelihood he comes from a low social and economic class, and there he is in a middle-class environment. He probably feels uncomfortable and self-conscious in the unfamiliar clothes he is wearing. He looks about him. The teacher, far from representing a mother image, must seem a remote and awe-inspiring creature. There is nothing in the atmosphere from which he can draw any comfort. “Everything he sees is foreign,” Ulibarri goes on, “the Hispano kid, Jose Perez, finds himself in a hostile environment indeed. He has to be something very special, a star, a hero, in order to win.” Ulibarri, a scholarly and cultured man, is an acerbic critic of the de-educating curriculum of the schools. “The whole program is de¬ signed to make him [the Chicano student] an Anglo. He doesn’t want to become an Anglo, or he doesn’t know how,” the professor of Spanish says. By the time the student reaches high school, “no one can blame him if he feels cheated, betrayed, and frustrated.” The malaise of the de-educated child does not come entirely from the forbidding rules of the unfriendly school, where “English, a foreign language,” mutes his voice. It comes from his home as well. Many of these children are hungry. They bring their hunger to school. They suffer from malnutrition and anemia that is so severe that a health survey of the Office of Education, in Washington, D.C., has estimated that as many as 15 per cent may have their thought processes retarded due to lack of nutrition. "“They may need food, or medication, or warm clothes to be able to learn,” reports a barrio classroom teacher, Hercella Toscano of San Antonio. “I do stress this need because I see it every day as I visit one class after another. I see children who are listless and restless. Some are in need of better clothes and some show signs of malnutrition. “How can we expect these children to learn, especially if they are hungry?” asks the barrio teacher.

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Poverty is not measured by the IQ tests. The hunger quotient is not registered, nor is the psychological effect of poor clothing, disease, and illness computed in the surveys of the lack of motivation, educational achievement, and rates of dropout. “Our kids don’t drop out,” says another barrio teacher, Froben Lozada, “they are pushed out by pov¬ erty.” The depressing effect of the de-education process upon the nearly two million Chicano youth of school age has been summarized by the sad statistics of the National Advisory Committee on Mexican Ameri¬ can Education of the U.S. Office of Education: ... In the Southwest the average Chicano child has only a 7th grade education. . . . The drop-out, or push-out, rate in Texas for Chicano high school students is 89 per cent, while in California 50 per cent of Chicano high school students leave school between the 10th and 11th grade. . . . Along the Rio Grande Valley of Texas four out of five Chicano children fall two years behind their Anglo classmates by the 5th grade. (The city manager of San Antonio estimates that 44.3 per cent of the barrio residents are “functionally illiterate”; 20 per cent never went to school “at all.”) . . . College enrollment is infinitesimal. In California, where 14 per cent of public school students are Chicanos, less than Vz of one per cent of college students at the seven campuses of the University of California are Chicanos.

Among the families of farm workers the process of de-education is most successful. The life on the road makes schooling difficult. The nature of the rural schools makes it worse. In the San Joaquin Valley of California, near Fresno, the results of a recent educational census show that the adult male Chicano has an average of 5.7 years of schooling. The de-education of La Raza is indeed overachieved. Of all the children of the poor who go to school as though they go to battle to defend their cultural heritage, none come away with greater bitterness and frustration. In the barrios of the Southwest the Chicano child might echo the lament of a little Puerto Rican boy in the barrios of New York City, who told a social worker, “I am illiterate in two languages. I am an alien in two lands.”

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The Language of La Raza The child of migrants and barrio dropout is heir to one of the most ancient cultures, magnificent literatures, and historic universities in the Americas. He is the descendant of learned men whose civilizations compared with the greatest in the world. Long before the founding of the University of Mexico, in 1553, the widespread school systems of the Aztec, Toltec, and Mayan nations were teaching their children medicine, mathematics, philosophy, art, architecture, and engineering. When the Spanish conquistadors landed on the shores of the empires of Mexico they were amazed, as Bernal Diaz del Castillo, the chronicler of the Cortes expedition, wrote, by “the many books of paper” the Mexicans had. They were “large books with beautiful paintings and symbols about all the arts, from which they taught,” wrote Fray Diego de Duran. “Everything was written down; they recorded their memorable deeds, their wars and victories.” In the schools “they also taught astrology, the meaning of dreams, and the count of the tears,” added Fray Bernardino de Sahagun; for there were “many kinds of schools” in the land—the telpochcalli, or houses for youth, and the calmecac, or institutes of higher learning. So vast were the libfaries of these Indian schools that it took the conquistadors years to ferret them all out and to attempt to burn all the books. They were not successful. Perhaps, the Europeans had come upon “the oldest literary works in the Americas,” as Leon-Portilla says in his Pre-Columbian Litera¬ tures of Mexico. The Aztecs religiously paid homage to a literature older than their own that existed “in a time which nobody can reckon,” before the birth of Christ:

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Those who carried with them the black and red ink; the manuscripts and painted books, the wisdom. They brought everything with them, the annals, the books of song . . .

The archaeologists have dated, by carbon-14 tests, the “writing and calendar system” of these little-known people “at least as early as 600 B.c.” In Europe there were no written languages at that time, except for Greek. Fray Sahagun, in fact, likened these Indian cultures of ancient Mexico to those of Greece and Rome. He observed a genera¬ tion of learning, of aesthetics, and of scholarship that seemed to him “classical.” “The same thing [as in Greece and Rome] existed in this Indian nation, especially among the Mexicans [Aztecs], whose learned, valiant and virtuous men are highly esteemed,” the awed priest wrote in the sixteenth century. The conquistadors could not eradicate all traces of such a civiliza¬ tion. Instead they destroyed its visible forms of power and sought to absorb, or were absorbed by, its riches and emotions and earth. In the “Laws of the Indies” the Spanish Empire acknowledged the impasse by decreeing that the Indians were “human,” and that the conquerors were morally free to marry the conquered—a recognition of reality that created a bilingual and bicultural nation and, perhaps, the Indianborn Saint of Mexican Catholicism, the Virgin of Guadalupe, as well. When the conquistadors and Mexican Indians came north they brought both cultures. In the Southwest they gave birth to the culture of La Raza, which was Indian, Spanish, and Mexican. The early set¬ tlers were known as Espaholes Mejicanos—that is, bilingual “Mexican Spaniards,” who were native-born, often of the loves legalized by the “Laws of the Indies.” On the riverbanks of the Rio Grande, in 1598, when the settlers of the de Onate expedition performed the first play enacted on our soil, the “comedy” combined the pageantry of feudal Spain and that of Aztec ritual. The horse dramas so popular in the Southwest for hun¬ dreds of years—such as “The Christians and the Moors,” later to

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become “The Christians and the Comanches”—continued that cul¬ tural and bilingual tradition and they added new elements. The literature of the Southwest was equally bilingual and bicultural: Spanish and Indian. Gaspar Perez de Villagra’s poem The Chronicles of New Mexico, written in 1613, is widely known as the first “Ameri¬ can” literary work, on an “American” theme, penned in “America.” Yet even at that early date words and concepts in Nahuatl, the lan¬ guage of the Aztecs, are in the text. In the years thereafter a rich literature—books, poems, essays, plays, histories—was created by the writers and poets of the South¬ west, in an indigenous idiom. The country was then part of Mexico, where most likely these books were published and in whose universi¬ ties they were studied, and where they have been forgotten. “We have to rediscover ourselves,” says Luis Valdez, the director of El Teatro Campesino. “There are years and years of discoveries we have to make of our people. “People ask me: What is Mexican history in the United States? There is no textbook of the history of La Raza. Yet the history of the Mexican in this country is four hundred years old. We know we pre-date the landing of the Pilgrims and the American Revolution. But beyond that? What really happened? No one can tell you. Our history has been lost. Lost! “Our generation says: Wait! Stop! Let’s consider our roots! Let’s rediscover our history!” Valdez says. Upon dusty shelves, frayed and forgotten, the books of this history may still be hidden. By word of mouth, from time to time, there is word of a lost literature, in reminiscences and folk memories. But the culture of La Raza has been effectively suppressed in the Southwest. The textbooks barely refer to it; the teachers are unfamiliar with it. In the Faculty Forum of the Lincoln High School of East Los Angeles a teacher of Chicano youth, Richard C. Davis, dismisses that history: “Before the Spanish came, he [the Mexican] was an Indian grubbing in the soil, and after the Spanish came he was a slave.” The teacher’s ire is aroused by a fellow faculty member, Joe McKnight, who has the temerity to suggest that “Mexican and Mexican Ameri¬ can history should be a required course in all Eastside [Los Angeles]

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schools.” Davis, who voices the “dominant view” of the faculty, dis¬ dainfully rejoins, “Mexican history is taught, what there is of it.” A few days after the teacher’s contempt is publicized two hundred parents picket the Lincoln High School with the inevitable signs of the times: “bronze is beautiful” and “we are not insects, davis! we are human beings!” The Chicano Student, an underground campus newspaper in Los Angeles, complains of “teachers who at worst have contempt for our culture, and at best have no understanding of it.” Chicanos are weary, they say, of “teachers who can’t communicate, books in a strange language about blond, blue-eyed strangers named Dick and Jane.” In the beleaguered school a student is more explicit: “I am a pris¬ oner of Lincoln High School,” he writes, “where Richard Davis is allowed to preach racism; he should pack up and move out of our school.” Says a Chicano youth, in Texas: “The worst thing that happened to me in my life was when I went to a blasted high school which was mainly Anglo. I was taught how great the Anglo was. Never once did a teacher tell me, Oh yes, the Mexicans did great things in the South¬ west. The only time they mention Mexicans in the schools is when they talk about the Mexican-American War. And then we are the bad guys, who lost. “They teach white history and white education,” the young man says. “You’re white and you’re great. So if you are Anglo you are given a superiority complex, and if you are not Anglo you are given a guilt complex. It’s a racist way of teaching.” The children of La Raza, humiliated by the textbooks, tongue-tied by the teachers, de-educated by the schools, have had to hold onto what they can of their heritage by themselves. In the barrios they have created their own communal culture and have invented a language of their own beyond the pale of the Anglo schools. In an “unlettered speech” they have created an unwritten literature. The schools ignore it. The mass media does not know it. The culture of the Chicano is voiced. It is voiced in the corridos of exodus, the chronicles of spoken history, Pachuco legends and cholo tales of the ghettos, posadas, the old, remembered church plays and

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the artistry of pilgrimages of religious politics, cantina love lyrics and aphorisms, and oratory in the language of ecstasy. Words of this oral language have special sensitivities and nuances. The words have an immediacy, a human vibrance and brilliance of expression that is often missing in shadowy reflections of the written words. An illiterate man may talk with direct imagery and tonal richness that the literate man has forgotten how to use, for he does not need it. He who is literate is truly illiterate in these ancient uses of language, which he nostalgi¬ cally calls “poetic.” When a language is primarily spoken, and sung, rather than written, like the language of the Chicano, it has to be lyrical in its rhythms, brutally exact, not abstract, and its symbols must be as living as the flesh. So it is in the barrios. The word is the flesh. “In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was made flesh,” writes Professor Ulibarri. “The language, the Word, carries within it the history, the culture, the traditions, the very life of a people, the flesh. Language is people. “A Hispano who does not speak Spanish must choke on his chili,” Ulibarri says. Can a language personify a human being? When an educator of the U.S. Office of Education tells teachers of barrio schoolchildren, “Wave your arms! Talk with your bodies! Use your emotions!” he is recognizing the human nature of the language of the Chicanos. The words are invested with bodily emotions. The meanings are the em¬ bodiment of feelings. Rodolfo Gonzales, the barrio leader of Denver, reflects this when he accuses the schools of “emasculating our language.” And the oracle of the land-grant movement, Reies Tijerina, voices a similar concept of language when he tells a banquet of lawyers in New York City, half apologetically, half accusingly: “I do not speak to you with my heart, in English. English is a cold language, to me. Spanish, to me, is warm and alive as my body. I speak Spanish with my whole heart, not with my head. “If you cut out our Spanish, you have cut out our heart,” Tijerina says. The importance of language to a conquered people has been recog¬ nized by the Congress, in the passage of the Bilingual Education Act.

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Introduced by Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, and cosponsored by Senator John Tower, as Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the bill recognizes and encourages teaching in Spanish in the schools, and was signed into law by the President in January, 1968. Spanish was no longer forbidden. Political upheavals in the barrios brought about the legislative acts. The “Texas White House,” where Lyndon Johnson then held the reins, was particularly alarmed by the disenchantment of formerly “safe” La Raza votes in the state. In the early and mid- 1960’s indepen¬ dent campaigns by Chicano politicians in Texas had caused the defeat of several Democratic candidates. “We made demands,” recalls San Antonio County Commissioner Albert Pena. “And they listened.” But the Bilingual Act was ensnared in old prejudices. Texas and California both had laws that prohibited teaching of regular classes in Spanish; in these states the legislators had to introduce bills to enable their school systems to accept federal funds for bilingual teaching. In New Mexico both Spanish and English teaching were officially recog¬ nized by the state constitution, but the practice was in such long disuse that new legislation had to be passed. Curiously, the constitution of the state of California had been originally written in Spanish, by a Mexican American, and the first vice president of the Republic of Texas had been a Tejano, a native of Mexico. But that was long ago. Even so, “As of 1967-68 the total number of genuine bilingual programs . . . certainly does not exceed two dozen in the entire country,” wrote Theodore Anderson, head of the Romance Language Department of the' University of Texas and chairman of the National Advisory Committee to Title VII, in the Office of Education. The federal appropriation had been a cautious and pithy one—$7.5 million —and by 1969 some 310 school systems and agencies had requested some share of those bilingual monies. Understandably only a token few could be funded. The bilingual classes in the schools are administered by the same school systems, in the same classrooms, and by the same teachers that the Chicanos have accused of “racism.” Grotesque parodies of bilin¬ gualism soon became apparent. For instance, in one school in El Paso,

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where the students are taught in Spanish for part of the day, the same children caught talking in Spanish during the rest of the day are punished with “Spanish detention.” And in the Imperial Valley of California, where one-third of the children are Chicanos, mostly children of farm workers, the bilingual program is directed by the wife of one of the largest growers. The Imperial Valley classes in Spanish are among the oldest in the state. Begun in 1963, they have been run by the County School Board, which has always been almost wholly Anglo, as are the local princi¬ pals, whose contemptuous attitude is expressed by one who said, “These Mexes will never learn anything anyway. So it can’t do any harm to try teaching [them] in Spanish.” In a town near Fresno, in the San Joaquin Valley, when a local principal recognized that the Bilingual Act would be law of the land he sent a memorandum to his teaching staff advising them to learn “idiot Spanish.” The desire for educational reform in the barrios is usually tempered with the demand, as stated by the high school strikers of East Los Angeles, for “compulsory bilingual and bicultural education [for] teachers and administrators to receive training in speaking Spanish and Mexican cultural heritage.” It is the teacher who has to be taught, in the eyes of the students. In his Bilingualism in Education, the barrio principal of a San Antonio public school, Nick Garza, explains that the teacher “must know both languages well” to teach the bilin¬ gual Chicano child. Unless “100,000 bilingual-bicultural teachers and administrators” are trained, the program will not become a reality, warns the Commit¬ tee on Mexican American Education of the U.S. Office of Education. That retraining program, the “revised textbooks,” and the classroom aids necessary would, in themselves, cost hundreds of millions of educational dollars. In the barrios the Chicano child has gone beyond bilingualism. He is trilingual. The language of La Raza is more than “hybrid language” that unites English and Spanish. In four hundred years a new language has been developing, with a distinctive vocabulary, its own borrowed and re-created grammar, and a unique usage, which combines the

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Castilian Spanish of the conquistadors and the frontier Americanisms of English with the ancient and modern languages of the Indians of Mexico and the Southwest. Pachuco is one aspect of this language. In the California barrios the “invented” words, evocative syntax, and urbanized rhythms of rural Indian threnody with which the younger Chicanos speak is neither Spanish nor English. The language of the Pachuco is the creation of the barrios. “Placa” for “police” cannot be traced to the popular Mexican “placa” that means “baggage check,” or the old Spanish “placa” that means “star, or insignia of knights,” nor any English equivalent. Even the proper Spanish spoken in the barrios is not truly Spanish. It never was. The ordinary, everyday words, such as tortilla and chili, are of course not Spanish at all, but are from the languages of the Mexican Indians, much as the Castilian Spanish of the conquistadors was interwoven with the words of the Moors. In a Joycean vocabulary that weaves together the words of the Indian, the Spaniard, the peon, the modern Mexican, the Anglo, the Pachuco, and finally the Chicano, the people of La Raza have been creating their own “mother tongue.” The words may be spoken with what Professor Manuel Guerra, of the University of Southern Cali¬ fornia, has termed “the intonation of sound patterns peculiar to South¬ ern and Central Mexico”; but the language itself is “influenced by the environment and natural habitat” of the Southwest—“the spoken lan¬ guage of the deserts” and “the language of the highlands.” The coun¬ try’s “foremost” linguists have “never researched the problem in depth,” argues Guerra. Yet, long ago, the venerable old vaquero of California, Arnold Rojas, recalls that “the Spanish of the vaquero [did] not conform to the best Castilian. The reader will, no doubt, search through Spanish dictionaries for some of the words. He will either fail to find them, or they will have definitions that do not agree with [my] text.” Similarly, the “dialects spoken in Texas are not good Spanish,” writes Anderson, but “ ‘Tex-Mex’ is authentic, natural, expressive— entirely adequate and appropriate'to time, place, and to circum¬ stance.”

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In New Mexico the old-time rancher “Uncle” Fred Ramsey, in his memory book, These Are My People, reminisces that people along the border have always spoken “not Spanish, but Mexican.” He tells of his neighbor, Albino Elias, the “descendant of old Spanish settlers,” who taught him the native tongue. “You see, I never learned to speak Spanish, but speak Mexican fluently,” he says disarmingly. Of this new language a new literature is being born. The young writers of the barrios have begun to create literary forms of the “unlet¬ tered speech” of their forefathers. In the modern Chicano plays of Luis Valdez and Rodolfo Gonzales, the multicultural poetry of Abelardo Delgado, Beni Luna, and Guadalupe de Saavedra, the La Raza scholarship of Ernesto Galarza, Octavio Romano, and Richard Duran, and in the barrio paintings of Manuel Martinez the infinitely varied, subtle and brutal, stark and complex life of La Raza is being trans¬ muted into art. The pages of the barrio newspapers and literary jour¬ nals of the Chicano students—El Grito, Con Safos, La Raza, El Gallo, El Malcriado, El Paisano, Bronze—are infused with the vibrant lan¬ guage, pent-up expressions, and as yet unrecognized literary force of those who have for generations been the silent people, “the invisible minority.” In the past the culture of the Chicano has been so “invisible” to Anglos that when the rural educators of the National Education Asso¬ ciation recognized the need for teaching the language and heritage of La Raza in the schools, in 1966, and issued an impassioned appeal for bilingual education, entitled The Invisible Minority—Per No Vencibles, they misspelled the Spanish in the title. But then, the educators had no bilingual textbook of La Raza history or Chicano culture to study. There has been none published. Nor had the major publishers issued any of the books, nor had Broadway produced a single play that has been born of the cultural revolution in the barrios, at that time. Just as they have had to preserve their language, by themselves, the Chicanos have had to create and publish their new literature without the simpatico and commercial help of the educational institutions. The first anthology of modern Chicano writing, El Espeso (The Mirror): Selected Mexican American Literature, was published in 1969 by the independent student publication El Grito, outside the schools.

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Inevitably, the new culture of the young Chicanos had to clash with the archaic de-education system of the schools.

The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa “Sorry, white man,” wrote Ruben Gutierrez, a student at Woodrow Wilson High School in East Los Angeles. “La Raza has had enough.” One mild day in March of 1968 some 15,000 Chicano students simply walked out of five Los Angeles high schools. By noon the strike had all but shut down classes throughout the barrio. The police invaded the classrooms and playgrounds. Swarms of sheriff s deputies blockaded the neighborhood, in an old-fashioned Western version of law and order. In an hour the arrests of students and teachers began. The buoyant teen-agers called it a “blowout” and their hastily handdrawn picket signs voiced their jubilant air—“education not con¬ tempt,” “education not eradication,” “teachers, si, bigots, no!” “QUE PASO? FREE SPEECH!” “WE ARE NOT ‘DIRTY MEXICANS,’ ” “OUR KIDS DON’T HAVE BLUE EYES, BUT THEY DO GO OVERSEAS,”

“is this a holiday?” Enthusiasm and admiration of the adults for the young Chicanos’ boldness unified the entire barrio. “These kids are proudly saying, ‘I’m a Mexican and I want to learn about my culture,’ ” said Philip Montez, a West Coast director of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. “When I was a kid we used to play it pretty cool about the Mexican thing.” In the old days, when he went to school, students did protest, said Julian Nava, the sole Chicano of the Board of Education, elected after a “school, not prison,” and

barrio-wide fight. Nava, who holds a doctorate in history from Har¬ vard University, recalled that when he attended a barrio high school, “I was told to take auto shop. And I did. I did what I was told. Students, who led the “blowout” issued a long list of educational

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demands—thirty-eight in all—to the Board of Education. They ranged from “textbooks and curriculum should be revised to show Mexican contributions to our country” and “the transfer of teachers who show any form of prejudice to students,” to the building of swimming pools in “all Eastside schools” and unlocked restrooms and “all campuses to be open and fences removed.” Support for many of the Chicanos’ proposals came from the Los Angeles Teachers Association and Local 1021 of the American Federation of Teachers. The abysmal condi¬ tions of the schools needed reform, the teachers’ groups affirmed; especially did they support “more bilingual and bicultural training of school personnel, more Spanish-language library materials and text¬ books,” and “better cafeteria food.” But the city of Los Angeles replied by arresting the alleged thirteen leaders of the “blowout,” including Sal Castro, a high school teacher. Those jailed were charged with “conspiracy” to disturb the educa¬ tional process. La Raza, the barrio newspaper, chortled that there were “thirteen Aztec gods,” so the arrested ones were a select and prophetic number. It shows how “ignorant” the Board of Education is of our heritage, the editors wrote. “These are our people, the cream of the crop,” declared the Chicano Student; and the youth did not really walk out of the schools, “they were pushed out!” Hundreds of barrio groups came to the defense of the “conspira¬ tors.” So did the Congress of Mexican American Unity, the Educa¬ tional Issues Coordinating Council, the United Mexican American Students (UMAS), Cesar Chavez of the farm workers, the Council of Churches of Southern California, the Pacific Southwest Council of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the local American Fed¬ eration of Teachers, the NAACP, and the Black Congress. Yet, when —after a year’s delay, uproarious protests of thousands of barrio resi¬ dents and students, and dozens of arrests—“the thirteen” were brought to trial, they were hurriedly convicted, fined, and placed on probation that forbade them to enter any barrio school, unless on official business. The probation was to last for three years. The Los Angeles Board of Education voted to suspend the teacher, Sal Castro. In furious response the leaders of the barrios—students

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and parents—calmly walked into the board room of the Board of Education and staged a sit-in. For an entire week they occupied it. A young student, Paul Ruiz, was elected “temporary” Chairman of the Board; he presided over the exercise in community control. Every morning a priest offered mass, at the podium, using a tortilla as a holy wafer. He blessed the protesters, who spent the week discussing school reforms, singing Chicano songs to the music of guitars, and voting a new school system. “Never was the Board of Education such a happy place,” one of the Chicanos said.

“liberated chicano board of education,” the barrio students and parents wrote on the blackboard. Then they went home. The bemused members of the Board of Education returned to their silent chamber. Once seated they promptly voted to reinstate the barrio teacher, Sal Castro, whom they had suspended the week before. But in the barrio schools the rumblings have not ceased and the grievances have not changed. “What, really, did the students benefit from the walkouts?” a Lincoln High School youth writes in the Chicano Student. “Not a damn thing! Why can’t the white man see our side of the story? We Chicanos are damn sick and tired of talking. We want action, action now!” “Our proposals have been made,” the Chicano Student had editori¬ alized earlier. “The big question is, will the School Board take positive action. If so, when? if not—blowouts, baby, blowouts!” Schools had become the no man’s land of the cultural conflict. They are the most visible, best known, and most exposed institutions of the Anglo society in the barrios. On the inside they are the bastions where the language, philosophy, and goals of the conqueror are taught; but to those outside they are the bastions that the conquered can most easily besiege, with common cause, so that their children may be taught the language, philosophy, and goals of La Raza. The “community control” of the schools, for the “better education of our children,” is the social issue that has united the barrios more than any other. “Education is like a god to our people,” says the barrio teacher Froben Lozada. But it is more than that. Almost by mutual consent the schools have been chosen as the

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battlefield. The conflict in the classrooms may be fought, and won or lost, without threatening the sources of social power. The economic and political control of the barrios will not change, even if the Chicanos were to achieve new textbooks, a curriculum based on the heritage and needs of La Raza, and a wholly bicultural and bilingual teaching system. In a sense the schools are the safest places to continue the guerrilla warfare of the cultures that began with the “Conquest” of the Southwest. They are safer battlefields than the streets or the voting booths, for both sides. “Revolution” in the schools thus becomes a paradox that is sup¬ ported by the Chicano activists and the Anglo establishment, at least federally, with equal fervor. In the fall of 1969 the Chicano students declared a national “walk¬ out” in celebration of Mexican Independence Day on September 17th. School officials in Denver, Colorado, acquiescing to the rebellious mood of the students, announced a special assembly in a high school where there had been a riot the previous spring, to permit “leaders of the walkout to present their views to the student body.” Never before in the Southwest had school authorities given such recognition to the Chicano “revolution.” Everywhere, from rural Texas to metropolitan California, there are walkouts, “blowouts,” and protest marches. The student activists de¬ mand community control of the barrio schools and an “educational revolution,” based on a new curriculum that honors “the dignity of Chicano life,” by teaching the language of the people and the “Mexi¬ can and Mexican-American cultural heritage.” In the barrios, where the classroom has become a battlefield, the “passive pupil” has found his voice. Schools are a common ground, most of all for the child. He sees that in the classroom he is not the minority; he is the majority. Growing up in two cultures may, at times, be precarious and absurd. But it demands agility of the Chicano. He develops survival skills in both worlds. He learns how to live “in the belly of the shark.” He no longer feels he must suffer in silence or withdraw, as his father did. The Chicano is surer of himself. He is outspoken, once he starts to speak. In The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, his play on de-education,

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Luis Valdez depicts a boy of the barrios who talks back, gets into trouble, and is sent to reform school. Joaquin, the Chicano antihero, returns home in the last act as a well-dressed, well-polished anglicized youth. But, he has no head! “He seems very reformed, rehabilitated,” says his brother Mingo. “A clean-cut American boy.” Lupe, his sister, is equally sardonic: “I think Joaquin, Jack, is gonna be okay, Ma. He can still find a job in the fields. A man doesn’t need a head to work there.” All through the play the shrunken, stolen head of Pancho Villa is symbolically off stage. When the headless, de-educated Chicano boy appears, the decapitated hero of the Mexican Revolution cries, “There’s the body and here’s the head. Let’s get together!” “It’s time for a new Mexican revolution,” Luis Valdez tells Chicano students at the University of California, in Los Angeles. “And which Chicanos are going to lead the next revolution? The ones in the belly of the shark! Nosotros! We! We’re going to lead that revolution! We’ve got to stand up and talk straight to the gabachos [the Anglos] saying, ‘Hell, no! I won’t go!’ to your whole lousy system.”

XVII

The Chicanos

The girl was thirteen when she tried to kill herself. She was “tired of working.” But she was too inexperienced with death to die, and she lived through her death. To escape her loneliness she married, at fifteen. Her child was born that year, but her husband was sent to prison. “I got a car. The car broke down. I couldn’t pay for it. They wanted to sue me. So I forged a check.” In the barrios of Denver to be left with a baby, without a husband, at fifteen, was to be lonelier than death. She became a prostitute. “I worked the town. They call it hustling. I wouldn’t go for less than thirty dollars. Because I needed the money. I got it too. All you have to do is be nice,” the young girl said. “But to go out and hustle I had to be under the influence of narcotics.” Diana Perea told heT own life story to the National Conference on Poverty in the Southwest, held in January, 1965, to launch the War on Poverty. In the winter sun of Tucson, Arizona, the nearly two hundred delegates who had gathered under the auspices of the Choate Foundation, to hear Vice President Hubert Humphrey, were as over¬ whelmed by the frail and frightened girl as she was by the presidential emissary. “Go back and tell them [your people] that the war against unemployment, discrimination, disease, and ignorance has begun. Tell

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them to get out and fight!” the Vice President said. “The wonderful thing about the War on Poverty is that we have the means to win it. We cannot fail.” He reminded his listeners, “Fifteen minutes from where we sit tonight there is abject poverty.” In the audience was Diana Perea. A few weeks later she succeeded in killing herself. Her death was due to an overdose of narcotics, the autopsy report declared. There were some nonmedical causes. On the frontispiece of the Summary Report of the National Conference on Poverty in the Southwest there was a black border of mourning around these simple words: DIANA PEREA

1946-1965 VICTIM OF POVERTY

Death is an ordinary thing. No one would have heard of the young girl from the streets of Denver’s barrio if she had not happened to share a microphone with the Vice President of the United States. In the streets misery is said to be so common no one notices. Life in the barrios is cruel—to outsiders, for the sons and daughters of the poor, it is said, are too hardened and brutalized to be able to do anything but fight to survive. A young girl cries of a brown child dying of hunger in the barrios of San Antonio: In the land of the free and the home of the brave, He is dying of hunger, he cannot be saved; Come brothers and sisters and weep by his grave. This is our child—

The ordeal of these youths is bemoaned by sympathetic writers. Not by the youth. Diana Perea did not weep. The Chicana was matter of fact: this is the way it is. Life in the barrio streets is just a way of life —happy, unhappy, ordinary, exciting, boring, deadly. The streets are not dangerous, they are only treacherous. It doesn’t frighten youth.

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Seldom do they curse the barrio. They curse themselves for their inability to survive. It is not the barrio that the Chicano fears, but the lonely and hostile world outside. Loneliness, the coldness of urban life, is what depresses the Chicano. In his family there is a warmth and gregarious love voiced with passion, uninhibited honesty, and gusto. The city frustrates and mutes this love. Faced with a society that he feels is hostile, the barrio youth becomes lost. He tries to defend himself by forming a gang, not just to fight for his manhood, his macho, but for his right to be a Chicano. “The most brutal method of birth control is the one we practice on ourselves,” a young man writes in La Raza. To La Raza Chicana, a young girl writes a bitter note: “I wish to compliment brother Perfecto Vallego and his friends for doing with Caterino B. Heredia. Keep up the good work, Baby, you and the cops [can] get together on the Chicano Annual Shoot. Your game is as bad as the racist cop who goes after Chicano’s who fail to halt. You dudes don’t have to kill your brothers; Uncle Sam is doing that for you in Viet Nam. You are shooting the wrong guy. No sean tan pendejos. If you have enough huevos [testicles] to shoot your brother you should be able to take on a racist cop.” The street gangs of the barrios are different from those in most ghettos. In a sense they are born not solely of poverty, but also of cultural pride. Like street-corner chambers of commerce the gangs of barrio youth defend the spirit of La Raza with bravado and youthful boisterousness. Of the many barrio gangs the oldest and best known is that of the legendary Pachucos, who have become a heroic myth. They were born in blood that was real enough, and they not only are remembered but are imitated with awe. They began on a day in August, 1942. In the tensions of World War II, the racial hatreds of Los Angeles were about to erupt in what was to be known as the “Zoot Suit Riots.” Two groups of Chicanos had a boyish fight over a pretty girl and hurt pride, in a gravel pit on the outskirts of the city. In the morning the body of young Jose Diaz was found on a dirt road nearby, dead. Bored newspa¬ permen, seeking local color, dubbed the gravel pit the “Sleepy La-

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goon” (it had a mud puddle in it), and an orgy of sensational headlines celebrated the boy’s death. Not one but twenty-four Mexican boys were arrested; nine were convicted of second-degree murder. All were freed later, two years later, when the Court of Appeals reversed the sentences unanimously for “lack of evidence.” The “Sleepy Lagoon” case is still remembered bitterly in the barrios, much as the Dreyfus case in France, or that of the Scottsboro Boys in the Deep South. Amid headlines of hysteria—“Zoot Suit Hoodlums” and “Pachuco Gangsters”—the Los Angeles police raided the barrios, blockaded the main streets, searched every passing car and passer-by. Six hundred Chicanos were taken into custody in a two-day sweep that Police Captain Joseph Reed called “a drive on Mexican gangs.” The Los Angeles sheriffs “Bureau of Foreign Relations” justified the dragnet by officially philosophizing that the Chicanos’ “desire to kill, or at least let blood” was an “inborn characteristic.” »„ The next summer the tensions exploded. When a fist fight broke out on a downtown street between a gang of Chicano boys and U.S. Navy men in June, 1943, fourteen off-duty policemen led by a lieutenant of the Detective Squad set up an impromptu group of vigilantes they named the “Vengeance Squad” and set out “to clean up” the Mexi¬ cans. Night after night hundreds of restless and beached sailors of the U.S. Navy, bored and frustrated by their inaction in the war against Japan, seized upon the nearest available dark-skinned enemies—the young Chicanos—and beat them up. The white rioters toured the barrios in convoys of taxi cabs, attacking every brown boy they found on the streets, in bars and restaurants and movie houses, by the doz¬ ens, by the hundreds, while the Los Angeles police looked the other way. No sailor was arrested. Inspired by the inflammatory news stories about “zoot suit roughnecks,” the white rioters sought out these most of all—zoot suits were an early Humphrey Bogart style Mexicanized by Chicano boys and lately revived in its classic form by Bonnie and Clyde. It was a long, hot summer week. When the white rioters exhausted

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their racial fervor, the riots—known not as the “U.S. Navy Riots” but oddly as the “Zoot Suit Riots”—had left hundreds of injured and a residue of race hatred in Los Angeles. The zoot-suit boys were Pachucos. Where the name came from is vague, but it may have been taken from the city of Pachuco in Mexico, known for its brilliantly hued costumes. In the riots, these gangs of Pachucos were not the aggressors but the defenders of the barrios. They were an early self-defense group. Youths who never knew the Pachucos remember them not as victims but as resistance fighters of the streets, the Minutemen of machismo, who fought to defend the reputation of La Raza. Wherever the barrio youth organize, the spirit of the Pachucos is evoked and revived. “I hope you tell the story of the Pachucos,” a Brown Beret says to me. “We have to learn about our heroes.” One of many Pachuco-type gangs is the Vatos. It is a fictitious name of a small gang in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles whose “territory” ranges from Laurel Canyon Boulevard to O’Melveny Street. The Vatos hang out mostly in the dark alleys near Acala Avenue, a poorly lit thoroughfare. A member of the Vatos talks of his gang: “This is the story of life in a Mexican barrio. The barrio is called ‘San Fer.’ The kids, so-called Pachucos, run this barrio. Life in this barrio is rough, harsh. The boys learned early to carry can openers and knives. As soon as they got a little older they graduated to switch¬ blades, lengths of chain, and guns, if they could get hold of them. “Boys joined together to form street gangs, and some of them sported the Pachuco brand between the thumb and forefinger of their left hand,” the Vato says. “This gang is the stulf of life, as the Pachuco knows it.” The gang member has to prove his manhood and his ability to survive. “He will undertake the most fantastic stunts to prove a great deal. He will risk his life and his freedom to maintain his growing reputation as a tough fighter, a rugged guy.” These rituals are not merely rites of initiation, or idle bravado. The gang youth has to demonstrate not only that he can fight in the streets, but that he has the strength to withstand the hostility of society, to stand up to the

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placa, the police, and if he is courageous enough, to become visible to

the outsider, by wearing a Brown Beret. “That is real macho, ” a Los Angeles community leader says. It is a new kind of political and urban pachuquismo. The society outside the barrio is defied by the gang. Consciously the rituals of brotherhood enforce the laws and culture of the barrio. Inside the gang the Chicano is insulated from his own conflicts. The Chicanos “find conflicts so perplexing and so full of both cultures—that of their par¬ ents and that of America—that [they] create their own world of pa¬ chuquismo,” says the Vato. The Vato goes on: “The Vatos have created their own language, Pachucano, their own style of dress, their own folklore, and their own behavior patterns. The Vatos have developed a barrio group spirit. The Vatos in this area are better organized and a little tighter, due to the fact that it is a smaller group; and therefore all the Vatos participate in the activities planned by them. “They formed a closely knit group that regarded the Anglos as their natural enemies.” In every barrio the social clubs and folk religious societies have always existed in semisecrecy, with their own rules and symbols, hidden from the world outside. Chicano gangs are the progeny of that invisible heritage—to outsiders—by which the barrio has protected itself. They re-create in their own youthful way, the society and cul¬ ture of their forefathers; yet they are urban. Eliezer Risco, the editor of La Raza, describes these methods of barrio organizations as “our own survival techniques. It is difficult for the culture of a minority to survive in the larger society. If we can utilize them for social action, now that we are stronger, we will sur¬ prise the country,” he says. “The country won’t know where our strength is coming from or how we organize.” In the dark alleyways and gregarious streets, the Brown Berets began. They have developed a political pachuquismo. A generation ago they would have been a street gang, nothing more. Less obvious are the barrio origins of the youthful leaders of the La Raza move¬ ments that have gained national prominence and importance. Cesar Chavez, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, Reies Tijerina: these men

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learned their organizing techniques on the back streets of the barrio. “They say the La Raza movements come from the universities. I disagree,” says “Jose,” the “Field Marshal” of the Brown Berets. “I say they come from the streets.” So few youths in the barrios graduated from high school in the past, or entered college, that those who achieved that miraculous feat feared to look down from their pinnacle of anxiety. If they did, the barrios beneath them seemed a bottomless arroyo. And yet, in the wholly anglicized realms of higher education they were also strangers. “You see a Chicano [university] student is alienated from his lan¬ guage; he is de-culturized and finally dehumanized so as to be able to function in a white, middle class, protestant bag,” the Chicano Student News reports. “It is damn obvious to the Chicano in college that education means one of two things: either accept the system—study, receive a diploma, accept the cubicle and the IBM machine in some lousy bank or factory, and move out of the barrio—or reject the system. . . .” Youths who made it to the university clung to their privileged and precarious achievements: non-Mexican name and anglicized accent, an Ivy League suit, a blond wife, and a disdain for the “dumb Mexi¬ cans” left behind, “the purple tio tomas” (Uncle Tom), El Gallo has dubbed these high achievers. “This is the middle class Tomas. He isn’t a Tomas because he lives on the other side of town, but because the Purple Tomas believes he is better than other Chicanos. Purple is the Royal Color!” The would-be intellectual patrons—“the new con¬ servatives,” Corky Gonzales calls them. Now the university students have begun the climb down from their lonely success to the streets of the barrios and the fields of the campesinos. They come as on a pilgrimage, seeking an identity. Los An¬ geles community leader Eduardo Perez says, “I find that many Mexicans-turned-Spanish are coming back into the fold and are being identified for what they are: Mexicans.” They have a “pride in being Mexican.” In the vineyards of Delano, when the striking grape pickers gath¬ ered their banners and walked north on the highway in their 250-mile pilgrimage to Sacramento to see the Governor, the university Chica-

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nos who walked with the huelguistas were wide-eyed with wonder. Not only were these young people from the universities, but they were the children of the barrios who had at last escaped, had “made it.” Some even had blond hair. Here were “farm workers with dark faces, aged prematurely by the California sun, marching side by side with students with youthful faces,” wrote Daniel de los Reyes in the union newspaper El Malcriado, the “farm workers with black hair and a determined look, by the side of blond and red-haired students with brilliant, sparkling eyes.” It was “a spectacle to see, these thousands and thousands of young people” who had come “because the Farm Workers Organizing Committee had agreed to join side by side with their brothers, the students.” There was a tone of wonder in the union newspaper story. It seemed unbelievable, this “brotherhood against ignorance and pov¬ erty.” These were “the same students we have seen so many times on the picketlines at the vineyards of DiGiorgio, the same youth working so tirelessly on the boycotts,” declared El Malcriado. Still it was not to be believed. The university students respected, listened to, and obeyed the campesinos of the fields; that was what was so strange. It was as though they who were illiterate were the teachers of the university students. The experience of the huelga was a strange and exhilarating one for the students as well, for it profoundly alfected the lives of many who had come. Luis Valdez, who went on to found El Centro Cultural Campesino, and Eliezer Risco, who became editor of La Raza, were but two of dozens of student leaders whose lives were changed by their pilgrimage to the vineyards of Delano. “I was writing my thesis,” Risco recalls. “I came thinking, well, it’s a way of doing my research. But it was my Graduate School.” Venustiano Olguin was a brilliant student in a graduate school of the University of California at Los Angeles and was studying for his Ph.D. The son of a bracero who had grown up in the migrant barrios of the Coachella Valley, he had worked his way to first place in his high school class and graduated with honors from the University of Red¬ lands. “I’d been very successful with the system.” But he had begun to

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have the uneasy feeling he was becoming a “Tio Tomas,” an Uncle Tom. “At UCLA I knew that somewhere along the line I had been betraying something.” He did not know what. One summer the young man and some of his fellow students in the United Mexican American Students (UMAS) had a meeting with Cesar Chavez. Olguin went to Delano—not to stay, just to look around and help the farm workers if he could. He decided to join La Huelga. He has abandoned the honors of higher education that he says were anglicizing him, indoctrinating him with materialistic values, and forcing him to reject his Mexican heritage. He lives on $5 a week strike pay. “Some people think I am crazy. But I think my life is very rich.” In the campesinos he feels he has found “a special kind of courage,” of manhood. “I’ve learned more than in all the time I was in graduate school.” University communities of Chicanos were affected as strongly. In San Antonio, Texas, a leader of the Mexican American Youth Organi¬ zation recalls how the campesinos of the Rio Grande Valley became godfathers of his group. “The strike of the farm workers got everyone excited. St. Mary’s University students got together to see what they could do,” says William Vazquez. “And that is how we began.” Luis Valdez, whose life was changed by Delano, feels it is a neces¬ sary school for students. “In advance of their people, the Chicano leader in the cities and universities must go through the whole bour¬ geois scene, find it distasteful, and then strike out in new directions. This is what happened with Corky Gonzales and Cesar Chavez. Di¬ vorcing themselves from the petty aims of success, they see the middle class for what it is. Then they can see the lower class plain. “In short, they discover there is a world out there,” Valdez says. Out of the upheaval Have come dozens of new barrio and university clubs. In the last few years there has been more youth organizing than in the entire history of the Chicanos. University students have been especially outspoken and active. The United Mexican American Stu¬ dents (UMAS) in California and the National Organization of Mexi¬ can American Students (NOMAS, literally “No More”) in Texas are but two of more than thirty groups on the campuses alone. The university and barrio youth are talking and walking together.

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David Sanchez, the prime minister of the Brown Berets, talks to students at UCLA, while the students of UMAS walk not only on the picket lines of the campesinos of Delano but also beside the Brown Berets protesting school conditions in East Los Angeles. The Chicano Student News reports: “UMAS is an organization of Chicano college students which is bringing the business of education back into the Chicano community”; and the headline says, “umas COMES home!” “Old hatreds and quarrels are being put aside,” La Raza writes, for “Todos son Chicanos”—“We are all Chicanos.” Several dozen Chicanos gathered at a dude ranch near Santa Bar¬ bara on the California seacoast for one of the many conferences of students and barrio youths. Eduardo Perez, who helped run the con¬ ference, describes the occasion: “Nowadays the young lions and lionesses have their own cars, buy their own clothes, work their way through college, and are very much on their own. Their whole thinking and outlook on life is as different from ours as night is from day. “These Mexican American ‘world leaders of tomorrow’ are an ex¬ ceptional breed. They can put on a charro [the real cowboy Mexican] costume and be proud of it. They can even put on American clothes and feel at ease. They can eat enchiladas and hamburgers on the same plate, tacos and pizza in one sitting, and possibly drink tequila with beer as a chaser and feel right at home. They have become anglicized, but only to the point that there is no excuse for them not being accepted. They take pride in being of Mexican ancestry and do not deny being what they are. These kids don’t change their names just to become Spanish or European heirs. . . In spite of the ease with which they seemed to go from one culture to another, the young Chicanos suffered an inner paralysis. They doubted not their emotions or their thoughts, but to create one culture out of two so different. Perez had written of another youth conference, “The Mexican Americans attending (most of them) did not really understand themselves . . . and how they happened to be in the mess they’re in.” The university and barrio youth had this in common too. “I stand naked in the world, lost in angry solitude,” the Chicano

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poet Benjamin Luna writes in La Raza. The loneliness of the urban society—impersonal, cold, efficient, foreign to his heart—evokes the feeling of a hostile world. The futility the Chicano feels is not fatalism, but a rage of frustration. Soy Indio con alma hambrienta, traigo en la sangre coraje, rojo coraje en la sangre. I am Indian with a hungry soul, tragic in the passionate blood, red passion in the blood. I stand naked in the world, hungry homeless despised. . . .

In the barrios, brotherhood is in the blood, the blood of La Raza. “One boy will bring beer, while others will bring rifa; still others bring money for the use of activities, or gas in a member’s car. This is a thing that goes on every night with something different every night that can be called a ‘dead kick.’ ” At best, their inner brotherhood is limited by the outer world of their “natural enemy,” and at worst is defined by it. A Brown Beret laments, “We are not what we were when we started out. All those TV cameras and news reporters took over our image and changed us into their image of us.” “Who am I?” asks a young woman in a suburban church of Los Angeles. “I have been afraid to speak up for my rights. Rights? What rights do we have? So many of our youth plead guilty in court when they know they are not guilty of anything. Anything but being a Mexican.” I am Joaquin, Lost in a world of confusion, Caught up in the whirl of an Anglo society, Confused by the rules, Scorned by attitudes,

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Suppressed by manipulations, And destroyed by modern society. My fathers have lost the economic battle, and won the fight for cultural survival.

The litany “Who am I?” is echoed in the poem of Rodolfo Gonzales, the leader of La Raza community of Denver. “I am Joaquin” is at once a defiance and a requiem for the history of self-mutilation of those whom the Chicano poet calls “strangers in their land”: In a country that has wiped out all my history, stifled all my pride. In a country that has placed a different indignity upon my ancient burdens. Inferiority